My third novel

I have finished my third novel, “Beasts” by John Crowley. It is a short novel, only one hundred and eighty-four pages, but my, what ideas this slim volume holds. 

( Synopsis )

This book points out through its narrative, men’s relationship to nature and how various types of people deal with it. In the leos, we see the romantic notion of “ if only we were like the animals, at one with nature, things would be better”. The leos are romanticized, but the problem with being like the leos, is that the leos are not humans. The humans who join them must give up much of themselves to be with them, on the other hand there is the USE that thinks that the world exists only to be useful to humans, again a misconception.

At the other extreme is the position of the people of Candy Mountain, who are fanatic about their belief that nature is all good and all great, but do not live among it. Their views lead them into injustice as well, because they fail to see that because they are human, for them there is right and wrong and giving over the leos for government extermination was wrong, and the leos eating meat was for survival, which is neither right nor wrong, but essential, because as Painter points out, he didn’t ask to be created.

In Loren, we see a middle ground, where nature is valued, but also tempered. Loren loves the wild, moves for and with the wild, but remains his human self. He does not seek to be anything other than human, but he also doesn’t make nature into something that it is not. He doesn’t expect human morality and reasons from nature because he understands that nature just is—it is neither good nor bad, human or inhumane.

I think that two parts of the novel are worth quoting. The first is an excerpt from a passage where Loren is thinking about a previous researcher’s findings on geese

“Reading again the old man’s stories—for that’s what they seemed to be, despite their scientific apparatus, stories of love and death, grief and joy—what Loren felt was not the shocking sense its first readers had, that men are nothing more than beasts, their vaunted freedoms and ideals an illusion—but the opposite. What the stories seemed to say was that the beasts are not less than men: less ingenious in expression, less complex in possibility, but as complete; as feeling; as capable of overmastering sorrow, hurt, rage, love.”

The second are Loren’s thoughts when he firsts sees Painter

“Half-man, half-lion, the magazines and television always said. But Loren knew better, knew there are no such things as half beasts: Painter was not half-anything, but wholly leo, as complete as a rose or a deer.”

I think, though that the most important thing this books asks of us, besides to think wholly and completely about our place in nature and what it means to be human, is not to draw the world in absolutes, despite what Loren says about there not being half-beasts, there can be things that are two or three things at once or nothing at all. Reynard, the canny fox is at once betrayer and savior, bringer of order and bringer of destruction. I think, for the most part, this impulse, this piece of our human nature, to polarize, to divide things into opposites, into either-ors, is the part of ourselves that this tale cautions against, because as I state earlier, nature and humanity, is neither good nor evil, it just is. It did not ask to be created, nor did we, and in that everything has a right to survival.