I always feel guilty when I buy new books and read them immediately, like I'm some cad stringing along the other books in favour of something new and shiny.
This is what I did this week. Upon turning 30 I decided 'fuck reality!' and went shopping, and then turned myself into something resembling Jabba the Hut while I hunkered down.
Though
Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell's Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears was non-fiction, I'm pretty sure I can still claim that 'fuck reality' statement from above because this was a bit of a surreal experience. When
Grizzly Man aired on Discovery I got a little obsessed with it. I thought that Timothy Treadwell, a bear activist who was eventually killed and eaten by bears, was a total nutjob. He didn't deserve to die but he sure as hell got himself killed by being a complete and utter twit about conservation. If you haven't seen
Grizzly Man, the jist is a
Blair Witch style look at Treadwell's interaction with the bears (using Treadwell's own footage) in which Treadwell comes off as an escaped mental patient prancing around singing to bears.
Nick Jans book did what the documentary didn't do for me - it made me feel awful for laughing out loud whenever Treadwell did something stupid on camera. Poor guy, I thought, He just wanted to be loved, and I was haunted when I thought of Treadwell's last moments (even more so when I thought of the other victim, his girlfriend, who essentially had to wait in the dark surrounded by bears for her time to come - you don't get that kind of horror in even the goriest Hostel-style film.)
At one point in the book, however, Jans yanks the bear-skinned rug out from underneath me and made me loathe Treadwell. This wasn't Jans' intention, but it happened. Here is a guy who was so into his own fantasy that he was a bear whisperer, that the bears were benevolent, that they were actually doing more than merely tolerating him (to paraphrase one of the interviewees in
Grizzly Man, they probably thought he was just 'retarded'), that he set it up so that he would be killed by one. He acclimatized the bears to human contact, so much so that one he had actually known and named was shot when the rescue party perceived it was showing a little too much interest in them (though Jans contends that this is probably the bear who did the killing and not the older, more ferocious bear who did the eating.)
As are most people, I'm an animal lover, but even more so I'm against stupidity. When the head of the Sea Shepherd society recently claimed that the deaths of four sealers in Canada wasn't as tragic as the seal hunt itself it was no wonder tempers on the ice flared so quickly. Not that I'm advocating the slaughter of baby seals for fashion but these sealers aren't exactly rolling in diamonds and rubies at the end of the day - sealing makes the difference between meat & potatoes and No Name brand macaroni and cheese for a lot of kids and puts them in winter boots, so I advocate changing the rules to make the hunt more humane for the seals.
Cruel remarks aside, activists unintentionally hurt the animals as well. It's fine while they're trying to free baby bears from circuses in Russia but when you have these activists breaking laws meant to protect the animals it amounts to the same thing as walking up and shooting them in the head. A seals that gets too comfortable around humans is less likely to have that trigger go off that tells them
move when they see a human approaching them. It's the same with any animal. In my own back yard I have a trio of deer who have taken to eating our bird seed and are so used to the suburban pace they actually start to approach me as I get out of my car to see if I have anything for them, and this is just plain sad.
It's the same with Treadwell's bears. Because of him, how many bears in his favoured locale don't have the fear they should have? Though I disagreed with much of what Jans said about Treadwell I wholeheartedly agree that humans and wildlife should keep their distance from one another. There may be such a thing as friendship in the human world but in the animal kingdom instinct is what rules over all.
Once I turned myself into a total Debbie Downer I turned to
Gods Behaving Badly. It's very light reading - I finished in a day. It follows a premise similar to a short story I once read about Greek Gods in modern times. The short story was much more serious, looking at Hera as a middle-aged woman pondering her tragic marriage to Zeus and also her son, Hephaestus's love for Aphrodite (and vice versa, which was very touching.) In the end we discover that the rapist-at-large she had been following in the news is actually Zeus.
GBB isn't as serious. I bought it expecting something of the Sophie Kinsella fare before putting it in the same category of Glen Duncan's
I, Lucifer (coming eventually to a theatre near you!). Then halfway through I realized that it was reminding me of neither - this book is more akin to
Shaun of the Dead. In the book Aphrodite is a phone-sex operator, Apollo is a TV psychic, and Eros has subscribed to Christianity. It wasn't so much ha-ha funny as it was snort-worthy. I loved Apollo to pieces in spite of his, "So ... If you won't sleep with me I'd rather rape you, if that's ok" moment.
But at the heart of this story are Alice and Neil, who are meant to be together. Alice is so sweet and charming she had me smiling with every line, and the way she and Neil are happy just to play Scrabble together melts my heart. In their first scene in the book, Neil thinks to himself that while Alice has never given him a kiss the fact that when he gave her a gift, she pushed her favourite knick knack aside to display his gift and that was like a kiss made a sound come out of me reserved only for the sight of pink hamster feet.
posted by A.M. Hartnett at 3:25 PM
