She discovers documents by and about the early settlers in that region, documents which are sometimes at odds with the official history of Canada. Notes about bear myths and legends fall out of books as she catalogues them. Spending time by herself in this house which seems strangely incongrous with the surrounding landscape, Lou tries to reconcile the rather conventional library of 19th century classics with the bear that ‘has always been there’ on the grounds, captive, yet obviously important somehow to the family.
Although at first she had revelled in the erudite seclsuion of her job, in the protection against the vulgarities of the world that it offered, after five years she now felt that in some way it had aged her disproportionately that she was as old as the yellowed papers she spent her days unfolding.
She could cite nothing in particular as a problem rather, it was as if life in general had a grudge against her. Lou is an introverted librarian in her late 20s who is sent on a mission to assess the estate bequeathed to her institute by the last of the Cary family, an oddly luxurious house with no indoor toilet on a small island on a lake in the remotest reaches of Ontario.įor some time things had been going badly for her. It is actually a novel about loneliness, about feeling alienated from the world, about being a woman in a world where men and career paths and options have proved disappointing. It is in fact quite a straightforward narrative, although it does have a fable-like quality about it. Failing that, I expected it to be a much more surreal type of novel, full of heavy symbolism. What surprised me, however, is how much more shocked readers seem to be about this now, in an age when the worst kind of pornography is readily available to all.Īre we in danger of focusing so much on the bestiality aspect of the book that we miss what it is about entirely? Given the vigorous over-reactions, I was expecting something a lot more titillating, but the sex scenes constitute a very small part of the novel. Let’s not be coy about it: it is about a woman who develops a passion for a captive bear, and this passion includes quite explicit sex. This is all by way of introducing the novel Bear by Marian Engel, which has been described as ‘the most controversial novel ever written in Canada’, although at the time it was generally well received by critics and even won the Governor General’s Literary Award that year. that there is less of a willingness to explore and push boundaries, that it’s all about bestseller lists and celebrities. I can’t help feeling that, in some respects, we have regressed as a culture in the 2010s, i.e.
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