The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Tear my skin with your clattering claws!’
Long out of print, this slim, sexy masterpiece of 1976 tells the story of a lonely librarian who has an affair… with a grizzly bear
BEAR by Marian Engel 176pp, Daunt, T £8.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £9.99, ebook £5.69 ÌÌÌÌÌ
“A strange and wonderful book, plausible as kitchens, but shapely as a folktale, and with the same disturbing resonance,” proclaimed Margaret Atwood of her fellow Canadian Marian Engel’s 1976 novel, Bear. To describe the plot of this slim, sexy masterpiece – now finally back in print – is inevitably to find oneself caught up in its more salacious details. Lou, a lonely librarian sent out into the wilderness, reacquaints herself with the pleasures of the flesh by means of an intimate relationship with a grizzly. But, as Atwood intimates, Engel’s masterstroke is to make her heroine’s earthy, erotic awakening feel both wonderfully and subversively celebratory, and entirely natural.
At the Historical Institute in Toronto, where she works, Lou spends her days “like a mole, buried deep in her office, digging among maps and manuscripts”. One year, however, as winter turns into spring, she is plucked from her dark, book-lined basement burrow and sent wide-eyed out into the sunshine. The recently deceased Colonel Jocelyn Cary – not, in fact, a military man, but a woman christened “Colonel” to fulfil the conditions of her ancestor’s will – has left her remote island estate to the institute, and someone has to travel north to catalogue its library and assess the lay of the land.
Although “no longer the isolated outpost on a lonely river” it once was, Cary’s Island is still off the beaten track. What awaits Lou in the woods there, however, isn’t a ramshackle log cabin, but rather an elegant white house, finely furnished – and octagonal. All the more surprising is the bear that lives there too, the last in a long line of his kind, dating back to a beast belonging to the very first Colonel Cary, who was born in England in 1798, but so taken with the idea of living on an island that he “opened an atlas of the New World, closed his eyes, and picked out Cary’s Island with a pin”. He then put a clause in his will that said the child of each generation who became a colonel would inherit the house.
Lou, who we are told “had always loved her loneliness”, sets about her work cataloguing the books. She plants and tends a modest garden, and keeps increasingly close quarters with the bear. It’s a quiet, methodical existence – passion, we’re told, “is not the medium of bibliography” – the gentle rhythms of which Engel conjures up with prose possessed of a similarly spare and unhurried elegance. But surging just beneath the surface are untamed desires, which find release not just in Lou’s eventual sexual encounters with the bear – described in relatively graphic but somehow still wholesome detail – but more broadly in the lush, wild turbulence of the natural world all around them.
Savagery is an ever-present threat. It’s in the description of “the probable violence of the colours in the fall”, the sudden piercing cry of a bird – “A bittern boomed eerily” – and, of course, in the looming, lumbering figure of the bear himself. “I am only a human woman. Tear my skin with your clattering claws,” Lou wills her ursine lover recklessly, drunk on sensual pleasure. Yet the more Engel describes the bear in all his animalistic glory, the more we also come to understand the creature as a metaphor for masculinity, exposed in the spotlight of the female gaze: “Look at the bear, dozing and drowsing there, thinking his own thoughts,” muses Lou. “Like a dog, like a groundhog, like a man: big.”
And in the background hovers the ghost of Colonel Jocelyn Cary, “a great lady,” as Lou calls her – who, she is told, fearlessly trekked across the ice in the winter, lived by her traps, and wasn’t afraid of the hard work of living. “Nah,” a local man who knew the old woman, contradicts Lou. “She wasn’t a great lady. She was an imitation man, but a damned good one.”
Bear is too wily and wilful a tale to be didactic, but it is all the richer for Engel’s subtle, probing exploration of gender roles and dynamics. It’s imbued with the sexual politics of 1970s second-wave feminism – not to mention issues of colonial plunder, both of bodies and land – but, like all the best so-called “rediscovered” gems, this enchanting, singular book still feels as fresh and exciting today as it surely did nearly half a century ago.