This well-crafted tale examines the essence of what it means to be a family. The author explores the exquisite beauty and human flaws of parental love. Where does sibling rivalry make way for deep loyalties?
How different are we from other creatures, who also have their own distinctive personalities and thought processes? What are the deeper significances of being human? Incisive yet tempered with gentle humour, this Booker-shortlisted novel probes the connections among all sentient beings.
Rosemary, an American college student, seems yet another intelligent but socially awkward youngster. Her brushes with the law and getting into scrapes with wayward companions, her references to her trying-hard-to-appear-normal family do not initially unsettle us. Indeed the author succeeds in making us smile, and even laugh. But they create the preamble for some startling revelations.
“My parents persisted in pretending we were a close-knit family, a family who enjoyed a good heart-to-heart, a family who turned to each other in times of trial. In light of my two missing siblings, this was an astonishing triumph of wishful thinking; I could almost admire it. At the same time, I am very clear in my own mind. We were never that family.”
Rosemary, an American college student, seems yet another intelligent but socially awkward youngster. Her brushes with the law and getting into scrapes with wayward companions, her references to her trying-hard-to-appear-normal family do not initially unsettle us. Indeed the author succeeds in making us smile, and even laugh. But they create the preamble for some startling revelations.
“My parents persisted in pretending we were a close-knit family, a family who enjoyed a good heart-to-heart, a family who turned to each other in times of trial. In light of my two missing siblings, this was an astonishing triumph of wishful thinking; I could almost admire it. At the same time, I am very clear in my own mind. We were never that family.”
As is true of many families, antagonism in Rosemary’s family “comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability.” Their efforts to maintain peace make us smile in recognition. “No more politics, Grandma Donna had said as a permanent new rule, since we wouldn’t agree to disagree and all of us had access to cutlery.”
Rosemary’s psychologist father turns out to be a propagator of “science’s excesses, like cloning or whisking up a bunch of genes to make your own animal.” “Was my father kind to animals? I thought so as a child, but I knew less about the lives of lab rats then.”
Rosemary’s father makes his family part of an already dubious and discredited experiment. He raises Rosemary along with an adopted sister named Fern, ostensibly to compare and contrast their developing abilities. Rosemary’s childhood world is ripped apart with the sudden disappearance of Fern. Only in page 99 is the truth finally revealed.
Fern is a chimpanzee. While her mother regresses into mourning, her older brother Lowell no longer believes that their parents’ love was unconditional. “He’d been told to care for Fern as a sister. He’d done so, only to see her cast from the family.”
Lowell nurses deep resentment and finally leaves home for good to seek his sister Fern, and champion the cause of mistreated animals. Rosemary realises that she “had been valuable only in the context of my sister.” One day, she was the subject of study.
“The next, I was just a little girl, strange in her way, but of no scientific interest to anyone.”
Rosemary finally leaves behind the ignominy of her ‘chimpanzee girl’ past when she enters a far-off university. Her roommate Scully echoes her sentiments when she confides, “You know how everything seems so normal when you’re growing up, and then comes the moment when you realise that your whole family is nuts.”
Are humans truly superior to other animals? “Dad’s experiments suggested that contrary to our metaphors, humans are much more imitative than the other apes... Human children overimitate, reproducing each step (in a puzzle) regardless of its necessity.
There is some reason why, now that it’s our behaviour, being slavishly imitative is superior to being thoughtful and efficient, but I forget exactly what that reason is.” There’s a hilarious reference to humans’ capability to govern themselves. “The only way to make sense of the United States Congress, my father told me once, is to view it as a two-hundred-year-long primate study. He didn’t live to see the ongoing revolution in our thinking regarding nonhuman animal cognition. But he wasn’t wrong about Congress.”
Rosemary observes that every time we humans announce that “here is the thing that makes us unique — our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language — some other species comes along to snatch it away.”
This novel is memorable for raising far-reaching questions, for daring us to push the boundaries, and reconsider our sense of being ‘superior’ human beings. All the characters, including chimpanzee Fern, are portrayed with compassion. The author’s sense of humour makes this a thoroughly enjoyable read.
Some passages discussing the failings of humans, references to scientific laboratories, farms and slaughterhouses, the indignation at those who profit from the misery of animals do weigh heavy and can come across as propaganda. “In 2004, Jacques Derrida said that a change was under way. Torture damages the inflicter as well as the inflicted.
It’s no coincidence that one of the Abu Ghraib torturers came to the military directly from a job as a chicken processor.” While this enhances the overall impact of the message the author intends to convey, it also makes us conscious that there is indeed a message which sometimes overshadows the narrative.
Rosemary’s psychologist father turns out to be a propagator of “science’s excesses, like cloning or whisking up a bunch of genes to make your own animal.” “Was my father kind to animals? I thought so as a child, but I knew less about the lives of lab rats then.”
Rosemary’s father makes his family part of an already dubious and discredited experiment. He raises Rosemary along with an adopted sister named Fern, ostensibly to compare and contrast their developing abilities. Rosemary’s childhood world is ripped apart with the sudden disappearance of Fern. Only in page 99 is the truth finally revealed.
Fern is a chimpanzee. While her mother regresses into mourning, her older brother Lowell no longer believes that their parents’ love was unconditional. “He’d been told to care for Fern as a sister. He’d done so, only to see her cast from the family.”
Lowell nurses deep resentment and finally leaves home for good to seek his sister Fern, and champion the cause of mistreated animals. Rosemary realises that she “had been valuable only in the context of my sister.” One day, she was the subject of study.
“The next, I was just a little girl, strange in her way, but of no scientific interest to anyone.”
Rosemary finally leaves behind the ignominy of her ‘chimpanzee girl’ past when she enters a far-off university. Her roommate Scully echoes her sentiments when she confides, “You know how everything seems so normal when you’re growing up, and then comes the moment when you realise that your whole family is nuts.”
Are humans truly superior to other animals? “Dad’s experiments suggested that contrary to our metaphors, humans are much more imitative than the other apes... Human children overimitate, reproducing each step (in a puzzle) regardless of its necessity.
There is some reason why, now that it’s our behaviour, being slavishly imitative is superior to being thoughtful and efficient, but I forget exactly what that reason is.” There’s a hilarious reference to humans’ capability to govern themselves. “The only way to make sense of the United States Congress, my father told me once, is to view it as a two-hundred-year-long primate study. He didn’t live to see the ongoing revolution in our thinking regarding nonhuman animal cognition. But he wasn’t wrong about Congress.”
Rosemary observes that every time we humans announce that “here is the thing that makes us unique — our featherless bipedality, our tool-using, our language — some other species comes along to snatch it away.”
This novel is memorable for raising far-reaching questions, for daring us to push the boundaries, and reconsider our sense of being ‘superior’ human beings. All the characters, including chimpanzee Fern, are portrayed with compassion. The author’s sense of humour makes this a thoroughly enjoyable read.
Some passages discussing the failings of humans, references to scientific laboratories, farms and slaughterhouses, the indignation at those who profit from the misery of animals do weigh heavy and can come across as propaganda. “In 2004, Jacques Derrida said that a change was under way. Torture damages the inflicter as well as the inflicted.
It’s no coincidence that one of the Abu Ghraib torturers came to the military directly from a job as a chicken processor.” While this enhances the overall impact of the message the author intends to convey, it also makes us conscious that there is indeed a message which sometimes overshadows the narrative.
This review is published in Sunday Herald
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