Primate reading: "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves" by Karen Joy Fowler

This is a most unusual novel. Really. It was one of the (newly admitted) US novels to be shortlisted for the 2014 Booker Prize, and it is easy to see how something this left field would appeal to the jury. 

This was one of those occasional books picked up rather at random and/or on the strength of its cover and blurb. Yes, this occurred in time-honoured fashion in St. Pancras railway station in the new Hatchards. I had never heard of it, yet something about it appealed. Good, because I am deeply glad I read this book, even if, even now, I'm not quite sure I know what I make of it. I have a sneaking suspicion I didn't get the half of it, somehow skating superficially over the surface of a massively deep book. 

It is fundamentally a story of sibling love and loss, of what it means to be human, of what a family is and should be, of what it means to belong to a society, of the value of life itself - not just human life. There is a deep thread of guilt too running through this book - how to live with the sense of something which went drastically wrong, though quite how and why remains elusive. (Shades in more than one way of Behind the Scenes in the Museum here.)

So far, you might also think, so not-very-unusual for modern literary fiction. Until, in one of the biggest twists I have come across, you discover, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the way though the book that...

NOTE: it is impossible to talk meaningfully about this book without "spoiling" the huge twist referred to above. It doesn't really change much, I suspect, but if you want, as I was, to be gobsmacked by the revelation, stop here, do not read on.

... the twin sister (Fern) of our likeable first-person narrator (Rosemary), who was mysteriously lost at the age of five, leaving indelible traces of affection, rivalry, joy and manic behaviour, was a chimpanzee. 

Wait, this is not a silly thing, but an earnest and well-researched exploration of primate science, albeit based on techniques which were ultimately discredited. It actually happened, in the 1960s and 1970s that researchers explored the multiple avenues of domestication, even humanisation, of chimps, including by bringing them into real human families to be brought up as if human. One can only imagine Karen Joy Fowler reflecting on this. What did it mean for the chimps? The answer is heavily researched and relatively well-known. But what did it mean for the children in these families? No-one seems to have bothered much about that, but, psychologically speaking, these were not family pets, they were siblings. 

Don't get the idea that this is some sort of critique of 1970s science; this book is way, way deeper than that. The premise, that of bringing an non-human creature into a family, to assume however a human role, especially vis-à-vis the youngsters in that family (Rosemary has an older brother, Lowell) provides a wonderful mechanism for talking about how families operate and the traces they leave. "They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad", famously observed Philip Larkin. Imagine how much more if they bring a chimpanzee into your life to be your twin sister. Or maybe that's a good thing...? Certainly, it is hard to deny Rosemary the sheer joy and exhilaration Rosemary's sister brought her, and left her with, as well as the, er..., distortion she brought into a 'normal' (another term we can question) human childhood.

Booker-nominated Karen Joy Fowler

Fowler's book is deeply sophisticated. It talks about humans, but it also talks about animals. It talks about animal rights, but does not slide into facile positions. It makes you think. Indeed. I wonder how often a book is so simply unusual that it does that. 

Moreover, this is superbly written. We know Rosemary not only through what she says, but through how she says it. Her language, its excess and its repression, are core to who she is, including in opposition to a sister for whom speech was the one truly insurmountable obstacle. She is a college girl from the Midwest, her vernacular that of her age-group and location, but she is also the loving, grieving sister of a chimpanzee , a monkey girl, indelibly marked, like her brother, by a relationship no-one, her bother excepted, can remotely hope to understand. 

This book is, as I say, extraordinary. It doesn't feel perfect, not quite sure why, but then it doesn't have to, because it is so different, albeit, page to page, seemingly straightforward. It left me puzzled, enlightened, full of admiration. I would, of course, recommend it. It is an experience one should have.