Woof! Woof! Miaow! Miaow! Books with talking dogs and cats are as numerous as feathers on a hen. Witness Sight Hound by Pam Houston or Caroline Alexander’s Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition: The Remarkable Journal of Shackleton’s Polar-Bound Cat. Our canine and feline companions are forever sticking their little wet noses into criminal investigations, as well. Their exploits are legion, in books such as A Dog About Town by J. F. Englert and Wish You Were Here: A Mrs. Murphy Mystery, the first in a cat series by Rita Mae Brown. But what about other animals? Where are their voices? Following are books with first-person (animal!) narration:
My favorite has to be Timothy, or Notes of an Abject Reptile by Verlyn Klinkenborg. Timothy is an 18th century tortoise living in the garden of an English curate. She is of a melancholy turn of mind, with a somewhat jaundiced, but not unkind, view of the humans around her, and she is lovingly obser
vant of the natural world. This book is a real treat. So is the wonderfully imagined and lyrical Song of the Crow by Layne Maheu, which is narrated by a crow who watches from above as Noah builds his ark. Deep in the ocean swims Hruna, a humpback whale, whose journeys are both physical and spiritual. He tells his story in Whalesong, the first book in a trilogy by Robert Siegel.
One very smart, bookish rat is the narrator in Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, assisted by author Sam Savage. Firmin lives in a small Boston bookstore, where he reads and dreams, and finally makes a friend in Jerry, a science fiction writer.
No list of this sort would be complete without mention of that famous cockroach in Archy and Mehitabel and its sequels (Archyology and Archyology II) by Don Marquis. Archy jumps up and down o
n the typewriter keys to compose his manuscripts, which feature his own philosophical musings, as well as stories from Mehitabel the cat about her previous eight lives, including a stint as Cleopatra. Pretty funny stuff!
That noble breed, the horse, has produced a number of fine storytellers. Everyone remembers Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, but other horses have told their tales. Alexander the Great’s stallion Bucephalas narrates his story in I Am the Great Horse, aided and abetted by author Katherine Roberts. Richard Adams (of Watership Down fame) helps Robert E. Lee’s horse, Traveller, put his saga down in a kind of Southern dialect.
And then there’s You’re an Animal, Viskovitz! by Alessandro Boffa, in which the author metamorphoses into a dozen or more animals in succession, each time searching for the love of his life. First he’s a sleep-deprived dormouse, then he’s a cuckolded finch, next an elk in mating season (you get the idea). Sex is on his mind, no question, in each short, light-hearted chapter.
Of course, there are also books narrated in the third-person (animal!) limited voice. There are some wonderful titles with that viewpoint, such as The White Bone (elephants) by Barbara Gowdy, His Monkey Wife, or, Married to a Chimp by John Collier, and Cowkind by Ray Petersen. ~ Beth dlF
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