These headlines may be a minor quibble, and Zsuzsi Gartner’s negative review in the Globe and Mail is well considered and worth reading, but they reflect a certain jokey tone taken in response to the novel, and to young Benjamin Hale’s audacious, uneven, though often thrilling début. Not so for the Observer: “ Benjamin Hale Monkeys Around.” (Hale’s Bruno, it should be said, plays with the monkey/ape confusion throughout the novel, giving the rest of us license to do the same, I suppose, but the effect of all this monkeying among the critics is tiresome.) “Young writer goes ape,” touts the headline in Toronto’s Globe and Mail, getting the taxonomy right at least. This is a book that is better with words than deeds, and a speaking, thinking chimp breaks into the citadel of man’s supremacy in a way that a merely sexual chimp never could.Īnyone who writes about “Bruno Littlemore” faces a vital question: When reviewing a novel about a chimpanzee who develops the powers of language, engages in sexual congress with a human woman, bites a bunch of people, goes on the lam, and narrates hundreds of pages of text-faced with all this business, this madness maybe, of plotting and big ideas, can the reviewer, or his or her editor, resist the deep-seated urge to pun and play on words? The early answer is, for editors or headline writers, at least, no. It’s a part of the novel worthy of discussion, but I’ll just say here that to my eye, Hale introduces bestiality not as an end unto itself-though it is knowingly bold and controversial-but instead to dramatize and magnify the main crisis of the novel: the development of language and thus humanity by a non-human creature. I’ll pass on that one, too.) The sex scenes have been much discussed, and were surely part of the reason that “The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore” got the pre-publication hype that it did at Frankfurt and elsewhere. (There is also an inter-species rape scene between a chimp and frog. Yes, Bruno and Lydia, the scientist who discovers his burgeoning language skills, takes him into her home, and with whom he quickly and then deeply falls in love-they become lovers.
Second, and something that I will leave perhaps to someone else in the club: inter-species love, bestiality, the coupling of a chimp and a woman.
0 kommentar(er)
