My third novel

[darkelf105]

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. 

The story opens with the reader learning that the United States had fallen into chaos caused by a civil war. The land is now divided into Autonomies and city states and they are desperate and dying. The reader then learns about the leos, creatures made by fusing the DNA of humans and lions. They have been around for almost one hundred years. They breed and are a new race of beings.

Then there is the USE, a quasi-religious group that wants to heal the factitious United States and bring the world once again under the dominion of man. Their platitudes and reasonable approach have great appeal to the masses. They also want to cleanse the world of all of the leos.

Enter the ethnologist, Loren Casaubon, who studies hawks, and is as the story opens trying to revive, sort of, he thinks it is futile but does it anyways, peregrine falcons in the wild. The USE takes over his project and cuts funding for it saying that the money would be better used to serve human needs. Loren’s boss manages to get him a job as a personal tutor for Sten and Mika Gregorius who is the head of state for the Northern Autonomy.

The novel then moves to Painter and Caddie. Caddie is a human indentured servant at a trucking outpost whose servitude is bought by Painter, who is a leo, but unusual for one. He sees the world that humans inhabits and knows that it must be dealt with. They set out to find Reynard, the fox-man, the only one of his kind, sterile and made by humans.

Painter finds Reynard’s cabin, but is forced to flee into the Genesis Preserve, where Candy Mountain is.

Candy Mountain is a huge construct made by vegans and naturalists who wish to leave no imprint upon the natural world. They of allow no one into their preserve, and so when the leos, for Painter has brought his pride, for lack of  a better word, start hunting it is cause for concern. We learn that the people of Candy Mountain are so dedicated to their view of life that they will go into the preserve and find every bit of glass from a window that has broken and been flung far, so as not to have any effect on the environment. So the people of Candy Mountain send out Merric, a sensitive nature photographer and film maker, who is transformed by his encounter with the leos and leaves Candy Mountain for good.

Reynard once again betrays the location of Painter and Painter is hunted down and imprisoned, but in the meantime, a film by Merric about the leos is shown to the general public. Sten Gregorius sees the injustice behind the USE’s and federal government’s treatment of the leos. He has been transformed into a bit of an Arthurian figure by the death, murder really, of his father at Reynard’s hands, and leaves to save the leos.

Along the way, Painter escapes once from company and meets Sweets and dog driven to sentient but not human awareness by experiments done to his frontal lobe. He wants to save his pack from the humans that wish to exterminate them. He meets Painter and elects him leader of the pack and together they leave the city. But Painter has been betrayed again, and Sweets is forced to leave Painter.

The story concludes with Loren, Sten, Painter, and Mika hiding from the government and waiting for the people to come to Sten, who plans to lead them into a better tomorrow. Reynard, who has died, shot by Caddie to appease the political forces that have imprisoned Painter. He comes back from the dead seemingly and we are never sure why he had his clone made. It is Reynard, but not, a continuation of him, made possible by cloning. It ends with the untrustworthy fox describing how men, and now Painter, must move the world, and he will move in it, because that is his nature, he can’t plan, only act.

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.