Algonquin Cat

[truepenny]

I had an erratum to confess anyway. The author is Val SchaffNer. I always spell it wrong.

And since this seems to be the book that is least familiar, I thought I should say a little more about it, so no one feels that they have been cruelly Led Astray by it being on the same list with Swordspoint and Watership Down.

Algonquin Cat is a children's book. The illustrations are by Hilary Knight (of Eloise fame), and they are to die for. Despite the fact that it is a children's book, I find it actually much more satisfying to read as an adult, because I get all the jokes about actors and publishers and writers and the Algonquin Round Table. The book has a very sly and subtle sense of humor, and is perfectly self-aware.

It and Watership Down are the only two animal protagonist books I like (leaving aside The Wind in the Willows, which is really about little Englishmen in animal suits). Tailchaser's Song is an abysmal effort to do Watership Down with a roguish wink to the audience--not as honest as tongue-in-cheek but also refusing to take its own premise with the gravity which such endeavors require--and I resent the blatant manipulative tear-jerkeriness of Black Beauty and its ilk. And the animals-with-human-intellect school don't even seem worth the bother. Why write about a cat if it isn't really a cat?

So now at least you have an idea of what you'll find.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Why write about a mole and a water rat and a toad? I'd say they're like the way a child imagines adult life, middle class English adult life at the time the book was written, and weirdly the dynamic with this is what makes the whole thing of them being animals and not animals at the same time work.

Zorinth was complaining about the new Redwall book. I thought he was finally growing out of the repetitive plots, but no, what's wrong with it is apparently that it's squirrel POV, and squirrel POV is kind of squirrelly and not much fun to read. It's odd, because I don't think I ever saw anything that looked so much like not-really-animals.

I'm trying to think if there are any animal POv books I like apart from Watership Down. I don't suppose Lincoln's Dreams counts?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I misspoke myself. Again.

The Wind in the Willows doesn't even pretend it's about animals in the Watership Down sense. Mole and Rat and Toad and Badger are bipedal and wear clothes and own property and interact as equals, more or less, with the human characters. TWitW is its own thing, off in its own little world.

The books I'm complaining about are books like, oh, er, *racks brain frantically for an example*, Carole Nelson Douglas's Midnight Louie books, in which the cat is a cat, owned by a person, four-footed, unable to speak English, etc., etc., except that it thinks and narrates its own experiences exactly as a human being would. There's also the appalling moment in one of the later books where she feels morally obligated to support spay/neuter but can't bear the thought of doing that to Louie and so has him get a VASECTOMY. I am not making this up.

So it's not animals behaving like people I mind so much (I was raised on Disney movies and thus warped from an early age), but authors trying to have their cake and eat it, too.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Euwwwww. Or, as they say where i come from, ach y fi.

What do you think about the Duane cat wizard books?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I think I picked the first one up in the bookstore, read the first page, said, Enh, and put it back on the shelf. Which, I admit, may not really qualify as a fair trial.

Are they worth a second go?

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I have more stamina than you do, I got to chapter two. Zorinth couldn't read it either. But sensible people I know like them a lot.

[diony.livejournal.com]

I very much loved the first few Redwall books when I was in the Zorinth age-range because they were what I imagined medieval society might be like without having all of the harsh realities. People kept trying to make me read things like Brother Cadfael and I would run up against the truth of it being set in history and just stall out.

Hmn. I am now contemplating the ways in which slash fiction is not anything like actual homosexual relationships but are what many teenage girls think relationship power dynamics ought to be like and seeing something of a connection in the way that the Redwall books animals are not actually like animals, but are instead a sort of stand-in for (my) childhood idea of what people in a medieval community ought to be like.