THE YOUR CAT BOOK CLUB
In the final meeting of The Your Cat Book Club, we head into the fantasy genre to hear stories told by anthropormorphic felines!
We head into the fantasy genre in the final instalment of the book club.
After the year we’ve had I’m sure we could all do with some escapism. Cats are, in folklore and literature, often seen as portents of change, guardians of the other world, or repellers of evil. Here, we have cats that break the surface of reality and reveal to us that the world is a great deal more magical than we believe it to be.
‘Of Cats and Elfins’ contains within it a slim book, first published in 1940, that will certainly connect with many of us cat-lovers. It is called
‘The Cat’s Cradle Book’ and it has long been out of print. Handheld Press have published several works by Sylvia Townsend Warner and other women writers, often neglected by the literary canon.
If unfamiliar with Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893 — 1978), now is the time to discover her. Hailed by award-winning author Neil Gaiman as “one of our finest writers,” she is perhaps best known for her novel ‘Lolly Willowes’, the unusual tale of a middle-aged spinster living in the city who moves to the countryside, submits to Satan, and becomes a witch. Warner’s work is typified by its deceptive faces: you go in expecting a picnic on the lawn and finery, which Warner breaks away from and dismantles, and end up in the enchanted folds of the countryside.
SHORT STORIES
There is magic to be found in ‘Of Cats and Elfins’. Introducing ‘The Cat’s Cradle Book’, Warner finds herself in the midst of an enchanted place. A young handsome man overhears her speaking with cats, and says,“So you speak cat?”To which she says, quite seriously:“A little… I understand it better than I speak it.”The man admonishes her laziness and her lack of application. One of the grey cats interjects that she doesn’t look like she has much application, while the long-furred cat praises her kind heart.The cats have taken her down the rabbit hole, into this Alice-in-Wonderland candour and she has tea with this man, who says he has long been studying the “culture of cats” by speaking with generations of cat mothers. He goes about doing so with academic rigour. The cats, we learn, have much to tell us, if we learn to listen. What follows are fables, in the tradition of Aesop, as told by these cat mothers.
She conveys the fantastical aspects of having cats.
Some among these short tales can be read between train stops:‘Odin’s Birds’ and ‘The Virtue of the Tiger,’ in particular, are brief.‘The Magpie Charity’ is short and unsettling: a rook and a crow refuse a cat charitable relief, claiming he is not destitute until he has sold his black skin. Elsewhere, in ‘The Two Mothers’, a mother wild cat names her kittens beneath a fallen pine tree in Scotland, contemplates the joys of motherhood, and anticipates how it will feel to kill a rabbit and feed it to her young. She goes out for a bite to eat and when she returns finds her dear kittens have been eaten by a polecat. She discusses with a ewe, soon to lose her young to the butcher, this order of things.
There’s a whimsical seriousness to these accounts, so anthropomorphised are these feline protagonists, and the other animals they speak of, one could be forgiven for assuming they are about people. But the fantastical holds within it a little truth, a reminder that so many of us are searching the underbelly of the ordinary for the extraordinary. It is no secret that we cat lovers often imagine alternate narratives for our cats. We give them human nicknames and affectations and imagine that in the stretches of time spent out of earshot and eyeshot, they are leading secret lives, where they have cultures, societies — perhaps their own languages. Warner tells such stories with wit and good humour, and after reading, you may well share a desire to write such stories about your own cats.
ESCAPISM
The fantasy genre offers an escapism many of us are probably craving in recent times, conjuring up that feeling of running away to join the circus, or being led astray by fairy folk. For me, the most beautiful of these tales told by mother cats is ‘The Trumpeter’s Daughter’. We meet a changeling — a fairy left in the place of a stolen human child. She is beautiful and well-mannered and intelligent, but her grandmother says the mere sight of her turns her stomach, knowing what she knows.The court trumpeter’s wife went walking on the heath and was gifted a chrysalis. Born from this chrysalis, the trumpeter’s daughter has a sad realisation:
“Then I have no place in this world?”
We have all felt that some time or another, haven’t we? She attempts to write songs, but they are blasphemous and she is arrested. Later, perhaps worse, she is not heard at all. Defeated, she heads out onto the heath and is followed by a man.“‘Who are you, have you a place in this world?’’ she said.‘I have a hundred places,’ he replied.‘I am a gipsy and I go where I please. Last week I was in Denmark, and tomorrow I am going to Wales.’”The girl said that life would suit her too and went with him.
A writer of fantasy, but not quite as we know it, Warner transforms the everyday into something enchanted and dreamlike. She conveys the fantastical aspects of having cats — and is sure to make any reader look at their own cat with renewed appreciation and awe.
Warner transforms the everyday into something enchanted.