We are all completely besides ourselves

Karen Joy Fowler

This book was so up my street it practically fell through my letterbox. It’s the story of a girl who was raised with a chimpanzee. It’s fiction, but based on real-life stories in which people took in chimpanzees as pets or as psychology experiments.

The narrator, Rosemary, is a woman looking back on a family tragedy that began when her sister, Fern, a chimpanzee, began acting dangerously and had to be given away. At the start, Rosemary and Fern are both five years old. Rosemary’s father is an academic psychologist. Her brother, Lowell, is a teenage basketball star – and so affected by losing Fern (and especially by not being told that she’s been sent to a laboratory) that he runs away to join the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Rosemary, bereft of her sister, and half chimp in her social demeanor, spends her childhood both pining for Fern and trying to put her monkey self behind her.

Lowell is soon a wanted man, so he sends home only anonymous postcards. Eventually he reappears in Davis, California, where Rosemary is now at university. When the siblings catch up, Lowell explains the anger that has driven his life’s work – and he cites, for example, the car crash experiments in which “conscious and terrified baboons” are subjected to “repeated, horrific and excruciating blows to the head.” He is a bit crazy by now and he seems to blame Rosemary for getting rid of Fern.

Now it so happens that in 1986 or 1987 – as a pre-clinical medical student at Manchester University – I attended a special evening lecture on exactly such baboon experiments. I was with either Chris Thurnell, or Chris Tackaberry, I can’t recall which, pretending to be a keen young medical student. In my case this was beyond far-fetched, but the evening was traumatic.

The lecturer was a celebrated physiologist who was busy perpetrating the crimes that Lowell cites. I was shocked to the core. I was twenty-two years old. I’d read (and loved) The Soul of The Ape by Eugene Marais (on the human-ness of baboons). I’d seen baboons in the wild in South Africa. And yet, in the lecture theatre, there was not a word, not a single word, of dissent. The horror! The darkness at the heart of Science! But did I put up my hand? Did I rise to answer this modern-day Kurtz? Even now, all these years later, on the train platform, or coming out of Sainsbury’s, I can find myself rehearsing the stand that I wasn’t able to make. Never did I feel moral outrage so clearly. And I still feel it. But was it the experiments that bothered me? Or was it not speaking out? I think it was the latter. Lowell is quite specific: to be a member of the ALF you have to do something.

Karen Joy Fowler’s book is really about a little girl who loses her sister. Now she is at a crossroads, finishing college, and the childhood memories are flooding back:

“It is clear that Mom loves Fern best. I can see half of Fern’s face. She is almost asleep, one eye fluttering, one ear blooming like a poppy from her black fur, one big toe plugging her mouth so I can hear her sucking on it. She looks at me sleepily from over her own leg, from around the curve of Mom’s arm. Oh, she has played this perfectly, that baby who still wears a diaper!”

Fowler has done a lot of research on chimpanzees and the book is a brilliant mix of science and drama. Rosemary, the narrator, is “impulsive, possessive and demanding”, traits she now recognises as “classic chimp”. Later she makes a wild friend, Harlow (Rosemary has a lot of trouble making friends), with the same traits. The book has the traits too! It jumps around, it grabs you, it cuddles up to you – and it swings you from psychology to animal rights to old-fashioned heartbreak. It’s well done.

I’d just finished reading Charlotte’s Web with Alice, so I was amused that Fowler used that book as a reference point. Fern is a chimp instead of a girl. Templeton is a dog instead of a rat. Initially I thought that Fowler was juxtaposing the bucolic kindness of Charlotte’s Web with the cruelty of apes used in science. Then I remembered the real story of Charlotte’s Web: Wilbur’s desperate attempts to avoid the slaughterhouse. Really both books are about the power we wield over animals.

One last connection: The early part of the story is set in Bloomington, Indiana, which was the setting for a famous movie called Breaking Away. We loved this movie as kids. It’s about a suburban boy so caught in the romance of cycling that he believes he’s Italian. (And I identified with that!) It’s also about the tense relations between the posh college kids (from out of town) and the local working-class kids (known as “cutters” because their dads work in the local quarry). In summertime, the kids (rich and poor) all go swimming in the turquoise waters of the flooded quarries.

In the summer of 1985, David Rubin and I took a drive-away from Indianapolis to Chicago, and on the way stopped in Bloomington, and swam in the quarries. It was exactly like the movie! Fowler has Rosemary mention the excitement that the movie caused in the town. All this added to my feeling I’d found a lost sister.