Paul Gallico – Jennie

Tags

Book Review, Cats, Children's Book Review, Children's Classics, Jennie, Paul Gallico

Learning the profound arts of purring, mousing, and, above all, washing.

I was sent scurrying to a re-read of this following a chance post by a fellow blogger about fictional books with a cat-focus Interesting Literature. Particularly as another post by a different blogger, about a book by Beverley Nichols Kaggsy’sBookish Ramblings had sent me to my bookshelves in remembrance of a book from childhood by Nichols, about his cats. Beverley Nichols’ Cats’ A. B. C.

I first read Paul Gallico’s delightful (and sobbingly heart-aching) book about a little boy who finds himself changed into a cat, when I was probably at target age 8-11, I think. And I have occasionally read it again, and it’s similarly cats-eye view orientated successor, Thomasina.

Although the protagonist is a little boy, this is by no means childishly written, nor does it just offer whimsicality about cats. I’m afraid, despite of course knowing the story well, that I sobbed in all the places I had ever sobbed before – perhaps partly because of memories of the first sobbing, aged somewhere around 9 or 10, but also, because some quite deep themes are being explored – particularly loss, friendship, betrayal of trust, death.

Hers was the call of the loneliness of the rejected, the outcast of the granite heart of the unheeding city

Peter Brown is a lonely rather privileged little boy – he has a Nanny and two successful, socialite parents who are too busy to give him much love and affection. Above everything, he wants a cat, but as Nanny doesn’t like them and his parents are too occupied with their own concerns to risk upsetting Nanny, Peter’s dearest wish is denied. Seeing a little kitten across a busy main road, Peter follows his tender instincts and runs, without doing his Green Cross, across the road. And is knocked down. Unexpectedly he finds he has become a white cat (I know, I know, but stick with it, this is far from merely twee fantasy)

A typically charismatic and flirtatious Siamese also figures,, and is the source of some trouble and strife for our hero……

Gallico, a life long animal, and particularly cat-animal lover, absolutely takes the reader inside cat-dom. Peter retains human consciousness, and has no idea how to circumnavigate his new world. Starving, chased away, stepped on by unaware people because he lacks the cat sense to get out of the way, Peter is almost killed by a ferocious territorial feral top cat. Fortunately, he gets rescued by the eponymous Jennie, a sweet-faced, sweet-natured, intelligent and rather plain fellow stray cat. Jennie is a cat who now hates people, following her abandonment by the loving family who were everything to her. She begins to teach the little boy trapped inside a cat’s body how to be a cat. And the reader too! Peter must learn the intricacies of being able to wash himself, the difference between the game of catching your breakfast mouse and killing a deadly rat, cat courtesy, the rules of cat conflict, how to open dustbins – and much more.

Although Peter comes to think as cat, he also retains his little boy ability to understand human language, and, rather importantly, to read. He has many exciting adventures with Jennie – including travelling, as the two stowaway and work passage on a Glasgow steamer. They have several instances of narrow escapes from various dangers which might befall a cat, and, as in all good books, grow, develop and change through their relationship with each other and external events.

Peter and Jennie learn from each other and teach each other how to be more – soulful, whatever the shape of the body that encloses them.

Gallico leavens sadness with much fun and good humour, and all his characters, feline and human are quirky, recognisable and sharply delineated

This is a gorgeous book for a tender-hearted child, and a tender-hearted adult too. And with even more appeal if some of your tenderness is cat shaped

Happily now re-issued as a Modern Classic, it was originally published in 1950

Jennie Amazon UK
Jennie Amazon USA

Advertisement

Beverley Nichols – Cats’ A.B.C.

Tags

Beverley Nichols, Book Review, Cats, Cats' A.B.C., Humour and Wit

Frolicsome, fantastic, feline frivolity

A chance mention of a Beverley Nichols book on gardens and gardening by a book blogger (thank you Karen) sent me scurrying to my bookshelves to find Nichol’s ABC of Cats, bought for me as a child – though Nichols writing style is anything but childish – by a family friend, who had a slightly waspish and fastidious nature, and didn’t really like cats – or children. He did at least have the generosity to realise the child I was had an enthusiasm for good writing, which ought to be encouraged, and that despite the fact that Nichols was expressing a lot of distaste for children in these pages (with a tongue I hope at least marginally in cheek) his veneration of cats, and approval of those who he regarded as ‘true Fs’ (feline lovers) would meet with my regard. As indeed it did.

So it was with great delight that I re-opened the well battered, oft read, delightfully illustrated – line drawings by Derreck Sayer – Cats’ ABC. With short, letters of the alphabet chapter headings, running from such important subjects as A for Amusements

Let us take as a simple example the familiar device of a length of string to which we attach a screwed-up piece of paper, in order to simulate a mouse. A regrettably large proportion of cat-owners, having manufactured this elementary form of diversion, seem to imagine that nothing remains to be done but to drag the string languidly across the carpet, giving it an occasional twitch, while the cat or kitten leaps and pounces and cavorts in its wake

This is surely the most stingy and unimaginative behaviour; it is totally lacking in drama, and drama is the essence of all feline diversions

to Z for ….

Z stands for…Whatever else we may decide that Z stands for, it does not stand for Zoos. This is a book in which no institution so miserable as a Zoo should play any part. I am totally unable to understand the general public’s attitude to Zoos

with many delightful staging posts in-between. Nichols’  aura is remarkably patrician and has definite sharpness and sting, a marvellous foil to his whimsicality. There is at times an acidity and definite wasp – the reiteration of ‘their horrible children’ though babes appear to escape disfavour somewhat – but his moues of perhaps slightly affected campness are not malicious.

I like to imagine that if I, as a small child, had smeared chocolate stained fingers over the Ming, that my obvious respectful adoration of kitten-and-cat, and my instinctive awareness that any feline should be approached softly and patiently, would have led to Nichols regarding me as ‘needs some improvement, shows promise’ as he summoned Gaskin-the-butler to clean the offending smears off the priceless porcelain, which at least I had had the delicacy and appreciation not to break

Following, mainly the lives, loves and loathings of his three-in-residence, Four, Five and Oscar, affectionate attention is also given to the very lamented Siamese, One, who, for very sad reasons darkens the entry on G for Gardening – one of Nichols other passions, which inspires his writing.

The G chapter made me cry, though he was recounting an event which must have happened nearly 75 years ago, given this book’s publication date.

Other chapters are far happier.

A wonderful divertissement. Cats a springboard to take in other important matters like music (classical) and art.

Beverley and Leo

To my delight I have also discovered he wrote another, similar tome, again with illustrations by Sayer. Which the postie has just delivered, as I sourced a beautifully preserved copy, at reasonable price, from a market place seller. PURR!

Cats’ A.B.C. Amazon UK
Cats’ A.B.C. Amazon USA

The UK edition I have linked is the Paperback One, which seems more readily available at reasonable price, and new, than the hardback. which I have

And, not at all in the spirit of Nichols book, as it is distinctly made to satisfy the non-Fs among us, rather than the Fs, but still too amusing to miss

Lynne Truss – Cat Out Of Hell

Tags

Book Review, Cat Out Of Hell, Cats, Horror, Humour, Lynne Truss

A Cat Is Purring. Be afraid. Be VERY afraid. (No spoilers, only lures)

Lynne Truss has written a witty, scary, oddball, corpse-filled. literature-loving, perfectly-punctuated, (I assume) , delight of a book.

The problem is – I can’t say very much about it without spoiling the journey which you, dear reader, need to make for yourself, without your own voyage of discovery being marred by inadvertent and carelessly strewn spoilers by this (or any) reviewer.

I was one of the very lucky ones, getting this as a very early ARC from the publisher, and all I had to go on, was this, from the fairly minimalist (great, no spoilers!) blurb:

 By acclaimed storyteller Lynne Truss, author of the bestselling Eats, Shoots and Leaves, the mesmerising tale of a cat with nine lives, and a relationship as ancient as time itself and just as powerful.     

The scene: a cottage on the coast on a windy evening. Inside, a room with curtains drawn. Tea has just been made. A kettle still steams. Under a pool of yellow light, two figures face each other across a kitchen table. A man and a cat. The story about to be related is so unusual yet so terrifyingly plausible that it demands to be told in a single sitting. The man clears his throat, and leans forward, expectant. 

‘Shall we begin?’ says the cat.

I must admit, the dustjacket picture didn’t particularly lure me – I thought it a little bit whimsical, and feared something which might be chocolate box cutesy humour funny-ish.

But of course, I know Truss is sharp, dry and pithily rather than fluffilly funny.

The story is dedicated to a friend who likes ‘proper’ horror stories, so, clearly this is going to be some sort of tickle your funny bone with horror mixture. (And more)

Okay, to try and lure you, o reader. Your cast of characters includes the above-mentioned talking cat (and another), an endearing dog (more of whom I must not say in order to avoid a spoiler) except that he belongs to a couple of academic Cambridge University librarians and is called Watson, so is the butt of several jokes which will delight Sherlockians. Then there is the central human, recently bereaved, in a Norfolk holiday cottage, with his laptop, no internet access but a previously sent folder from a fellow librarian. There is an actor who is a little slow on the uptake.There are a good few bodies. There are copious classic literature references (our man is a librarian, after all) . There is academic and historical research into occult literature.

Even if you are remarkably unacquainted and uninterested in library stacks, Victorian fiction, the history of occultism, Egyptology, demonology or preconceptions about cats and dogs, this book will I think be a page turning delight. Believe me. Our talking cat doesn’t do chat, for example, but masters cryptic crosswords and is highly supercilious (and other things)

Don’t mess wid me, punk

As for the dedication to the friend who likes ‘proper’ horror stories, suffice it to say that in bed early in the morning, having fed the cats, and enjoying my breakfast cuppa, with a cat nestling cosily beside me I read this (I have made a few excisions to avoid spoilers)

 The exceptional cats…..aren’t the product of some sort of miracle…..they just haven’t degenerated the way all the others have….this explains such a lot about cat behaviour….When they hiss at us, you can tell that they really expect us to fall over and die…because that is what used to happen. So when we stand there, unharmed, and laughing in their faces, they’re completely miffed…..they’re conscious of having lost their ability to do serious evil, and they feel bloody humiliated

At which point, cosy nestling cat began to talk….”Mrr…Mhaa…Mmmaaaahhr”  and I must admit I had a slight ‘hairs up’ moment at the timing, and she continued to utter short little cat exclamations for no reason I could discern. Then she climbed onto my lap, gazed at me seriously, as she is wont to do, and began kneading and purring. I read on….

You know the way cats do that trampling sort of thing on your lap……It was how cats used to kill people by pretending to be friendly and then severing their femoral arteries! Purring was the way they sent people into a trance…..

Upon which, I discreetly (not wanting to anger her) but purposefully got up and had a shower.

There is so much to enjoy in this, and I hope that I have persuaded you to read it, on publication. Believe me, this is nothing like any of those wonderful, but whimsical Paul Gallico cat books, and DEFINITELY nothing like the ‘spiritual’ fluffy cat books currently in vogue

I did feel that the final section managed the balance of horror and humour rather less well – the detecting and investigation part of the story was terrific, but the inevitable confrontation between antagonists, once deduction has happened, did see my extreme enjoyment wane a bit. I felt Truss was rather better at slow set up than at rapid action.

Overall though, I absolutely recommend this

PS Any one interested in giving a home to 3 extremely good natured cats? I don’t THINK any of them know how to read emails. Well I hope not. Was that scratching behind the wainscoting………..?

Oh – and finally, such is the authenticity of Truss’s writing that even though I know (don’t I?) that this IS a fantasy, I was interested in seeing what had been thrown up in the research, and Googled some of the named characters and search terms cited by our academician and found……….(well, that would be telling, and maybe YOU will just have to see for yourself!)

PPS Aficionados of Truss’s’ grammatical works: any crimes of MY grammar and punctuation above, are to be deplored. Please DON’T tell Truss about my linguistic offences.

Cat Out Of Hell Amazon UK
Cat Out Of Hell Amazon USA

(A post blog publication edit. Kudos to WordPress’s ‘similar posts’ widget which paired this book with a couple of very sensible fiction ‘fellow travellers’, especially a Shirley Jackson book……but the third, which made me laugh hugely, was a non-fiction book about 150 birds of Britain and Ireland. Given the title of the book reviewed above, make that 149,148,147……..)

John Bradshaw – Cat Sense

Tags

Animal behaviour, Book Review, Cat sense, Cats, John Bradshaw, Soapbox

Anthropomorphism debunked – or are we really guilty of human special pleading?

I confess to a strong desire to stand scientists on their heads when I read any animal studies which look at those of us with a tendency to ascribe ‘human’ motivations, feelings and even thoughts to ‘dumb animals’, as being guilty of anthropomorphism.

Particularly in relationship to ‘dumb animals’ we may choose to share our lives with. In common parlance, pets.

John Bradshaw is a British biologist, probably its fair to say that he is really (whispers) a dog-lover, but clearly does like cats. QUITE a lot

I remember, years ago, reading an earlier book which Bradshaw wrote on the subject of woman’s best friend, and thinking, hmm, doggy person, distinctly doggy. There was a little too much stressing the superior qualities of the canine versus the not quite so intelligent, personable qualities of the feline.

I cannot deny my own reverse prejudices. I like dogs rather a lot, but my heart belongs to tabby.

But it isn’t this which makes me wish to invert Mr Bradshaw and his fairly interesting (though a little dryly written – a bit four square and lacking in cattish whimsicality and quirkiness for my tastes) tome.

It is the assumption that those of us who ascribe the prevalence of complex emotions to non human, or at least non-primate, species, are guilty of anthropomorphising animals.

There is another way of looking at all this – and it comes, not just from those who have strong connections with our companion animals, or other animals, but from OTHER scientists, who study animals with less of a sense of the uniqueness of the human animal, and more of a sense of a continuum of evolution which means that our very complex ‘humanity’ may be seen as a developing continuum across other species. 

Anyone who is interested in this approach may well find that the observations and studies cited in books by Jonathan Balcombe an absorbing, convincing and educative read

But one doesn’t have even to go along with this to think that some of the studies Bradshaw cites, ‘debunking’ animal ‘owners’ beliefs, may themselves miss the point.

One particular study involved disproving the fact that dogs could feel guilt, by setting up a double blind experiment whereby owners believe their dogs have been guilty of a misdemeanour (food theft) when in fact only SOME of the dogs have been, and comparing which owners recognise the guilt of their dog by the ‘expression’ on the dogs face, on coming back into the room (the owners are told their dog has ‘offended’, though not all dogs HAVE). The owners (including those with with innocent dogs) report guilty looks from the dogs.

Two ideas hit me – dogs (and cats, as Bradshaw acknowledges) have the skills to ‘read’ their humans – it is an evolutionary advantage to be able to be able to second guess and interpret what another animal is about to do. Given a dog WILL read its owner it is not a far jump to assume an owner projecting ‘bad dog’ posture, and facial expression WILL result in the ‘interpreting your-human’ sensitive dog in itself projecting ‘Whoops I have been a BAD DOG’ – as the animal will have picked up ‘bad dog’ from the owner and so is likely to reflect their bad guilty dogness back

The other thought is that PEOPLE readily ASSUME guilt, feel guilt, and even project clearly ‘I am guilty’ when they are no such thing.  One only has to think about situations where wrongdoing is being checked for – think about the airport scan experience,  or even, what most of us may feel on passing a policeman on patrol, even though we are squeaky innocent as the driven snow. MOST people, even though they know they have no contraband etc and are not breaking the law,  will feel a prickle of imaginative anxiety and guilt and begin to LOOK a little shifty

I’m not saying the dogs were going through that process (though of course such a complex cascade cannot have sprung into being fully formed in homo sapiens with having some sort of ‘proto development at an earlier stage) But the projection/imagining ‘my dog is guilty’ to dog LOOKING guilty does not mean it is purely an owner’s imagination that the dog expresses a certain look.

Whilst I appreciate there may be a fairly narrow window of opportunity, within a kitten’s life, for socialisation with humans to happen, so that a very young kitten (we are talking around the second month), needs to be used to humans, and being handled by humans (kindly) for it to be receptive and desirous of human touch, this surely is not so different from the experience of a baby. Where Bradshaw (I think) is talking about genetic ancestry from the wild, versus the imprint of early experience and environmental modification, he does I feel rather look at cat response as different in kind from human response. Whereas, much work on the development of small babies also shows the profound importance of habituation to good touch. Brains have plasticity, both the brains of Homo sapiens and the brains of Felis catus.

Ashley Montagu in his profoundly informative book Touching, though it is subtitled Human Significence of the Skin is very much about a common mammalian inheritance. Montagu shows that young babies, young primates, young puppies, kittens and indeed the poor old lab rat, may not be that different from each other, and that the plasticity of the early brain is profoundly important (for good or ill)

So….interesting though Bradshaw’s book may be, it also frustrated me somewhat, as it was coming from a place of difference between humans and other animals. A difference which some animal behaviourists, like the aforementioned Balcombe, indicate may be much narrower than we think

Bradshaw did not really tell me much I didn’t already know, except in the closing chapters of the book where he looks at the FUTURE of the domestic cat, as influenced by the fact that most responsible owners who share their lives with ‘moggies’ are likely to have had them neutered. This means that outside pedigree breeding (which has its own potential problems as visual desirability makes breeders choose mates for their queens, rather than cat choice selecting for health) there is a greater tendency for un-neutered domestic queens to be breeding with feral toms. This is more likely to result in the resulting kittens to have a wilder, less ‘socialised domestic’ temperament than the mating of 2 moggy domestics. This of course assumes that some of the suitability for domestication in our cats will be of genetic base and not just environmental. There is interesting genetic evidence in terms of a long history of genetic mingling between small wild cats Felis lybica, Felis sylvestris and our domesticated catus.

Finally, I have no wish to leave Mr Bradshaw standing on his head, though I have no idea what this less than pleased looking tabby feels about that.

My own felines do not appear within this post. They are extremely private individuals and request that the paparazzi leave them alone, at this challenging time.As this book was an ARC from the publishers via Netgalley, and it not yet appearing on the Amazon’s for prepublication ordering, links will have to wait

I did enjoy reading this book, though I was often in disputatious mode, snorting crossly at the elevation of homo sapiens and man’s best friend

Having shared my life with various cats (and dogs) over many years, most of which have been rescue animals, and none of which have been pedigree, I have only ever had one cat which was more attached to place than person and did not intensely form a relationship with me. And it does not surprise me that this was my very first cat, when I was in some ways too young to understand MYSELF never mind how best to respond to the complexities of the needs of other beings in my world, whether human or cat.