Her pregnancy coincides with the discovery of a brain tumor, which causes her to lose language, and renders her completely dependent on others. This book belongs much more to the tradition of picaresques and bildungsromans like “Tom Jones” and “David Copperfield” than it does to the narrower genre of books narrated by animals, such as Leon Rooke’s “Shakespeare’s Dog.”īruno’s evolution is paralleled by Lydia’s decline. He even says of losing his virginity: “Bruno was a man now!” He also say of his life with Lydia, “We behaved like two children when we were alone, two sexually active children.” And perhaps that is closer to the mark: Bruno is a precocious human child, with a wild streak. But, because the book is told in the first person by an evolved, mature Bruno, I always thought of him as human. Hale’s book is, above all else, about “the search for what it means to be human,” and the narrative charts Bruno’s development from ape to man, with inevitable bumps and regressions.

If we’ve made it this far into the book, we are also sympathetic to Bruno and we want him to have his heart’s desire. It isn’t as offensive as the earlier frog scene because the reader (or at least this reader) thinks of Bruno as human, not as a chimpanzee. And Bruno’s recall of the event is filled with wonder, like an adolescent boy’s first discovery of sex. Lydia may be asleep, but she participates in a manner that suggests compliance-pulling Bruno’s head toward her vagina not pushing him away when he engages in intercourse with her. But the way Hale writes the scene almost succeeds in completely neutering these two sources of outrage. The reason it should have been appalling is twofold-it is a “sort-of” rape, as Bruno admits (Lydia is asleep) and it is an act of bestiality. (If you can think of others, please post below.) The scene that should have been the most appalling in the book is the night that Bruno loses his virginity.

And John Collier’s “His Monkey Wife” took a more satirical look at the love between man and ape. William Tester’s “Darling” described with delicacy and lyricism the relations between a young man and a cow. Yet there is a tradition of fiction about physical love between humans and animals.

No doubt this desire to discomfit also factored into Hale’s decision to give lengthy descriptions of sex between Bruno and Lydia. See Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things.”) (Incest has been used for that purpose in our time, I think. Ackerley may have chosen the love of a dog-like Humbert Humbert’s emotion, a true passion-for the same reason, to confront his readers with the image of a wild love, a crazy love, something that could make them truly uncomfortable. In a 1958 essay on “Lolita,” Lionel Trilling argued that Nabokov chose a subject as shocking as pedophilia for want of any more potent image of forbidden love.

The evolution of bruno littlemore