Where the Wild Things Are
A young boy's obsession with mysterious medieval animals goes way beyond lions, tigers and bears.

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Sunday, July 22, 2007

THE BESTIARY

By Nicholas Christopher

Dial. 307 pp. $25

Long before we became experts at driving animals to extinction, we were desperate to record their existence. Naming the animals was the only work Adam did in Paradise, which suggests something about the fundamental pleasure we still get from identifying creatures. The most ancient paintings in the world show bison and mammoths cavorting. Herodotus, Aristotle and Pliny the Elder produced wide-ranging works of natural history. By the 12th century, Europe was gaga over bestiaries: lavishly illustrated books that described all the known animals, along with mystical creatures, such as the sphinx, the griffin and the chimera. Medieval authors assigned various moral and allegorical significance to each animal as a way of "reading" the natural world that God created. There's something oddly compelling about these ancient portraits -- their strange mingling of wisdom and whimsy.

And now, like the phoenix rising from its ashes, the idea of searching for meaning in lost animals has been reborn in Nicholas Christopher's magical and melancholy novel The Bestiary. The story begins with the childhood of Xeno Atlas in New York in the 1950s. His mother died when he was born, and his father, who never recovered from that loss, travels around the world for months at a time on freighters. "Loneliness was at the center of my childhood," Xeno tells us. "From it proceeded all I was to become."

Left to the care of his maternal grandmother, who "had strong connections to the animal spirits," Xeno is raised on fantastical stories. "I heard about the one-winged stork that flew over the Alps and laid an egg from which an entire city was born; and the serpent that ate the moon and spat out a skyful of stars; and the black bear that fell asleep on a mountaintop and awoke a hundred years later in the same spot, now a tiny island in the sea, and turned himself into a whale."

In his dreary household these stories provide an element of necessary magic, and it's no surprise when, for a moment, the boundary between reality and fantasy seems to fray: "Late one night," Xeno writes, "after she finished one of her stories, the stray headlight of a passing car shone through the window and I was stunned to see, not my grandmother, but a red fox, with a ring of white fur around its neck, stretched out on her bed."

Christopher is doing something strange here -- and tantalizing. Another time, Xeno wakes up and sees something perched on his windowsill: "Its wings, tail, and spiky crest were silhouetted against a yellow moon. I was frightened but also thrilled when I realized it was one of the two griffins that graced the parapet of the First National Bank." His story remains entirely realistic, and there's no reason to think these unnatural sightings are anything but the waking dreams of a little boy raised on a rich diet of animal legends, and yet . . . and yet subsequent events suggest, ever so subtly, that his brief visions are in fact insights to some deeper reality, a world of mythological meaning and connection that attracts Xeno for the rest of his life.

Sent to a prison-like boarding school in Maine, the boy takes refuge in his history classes, where he first learns of the medieval bestiaries. Pressed to explain his interest, he can only reply, "I just can't get it out of my head." And so begins a lifelong search for the most fabulous bestiary of all, "The Caravan Bestiary," invented by Christopher and brilliantly woven into the history of several actual manuscripts. This lost document is rumored to include all the animals denied entry on Noah's Ark. "It was one of those rare instances," Xeno tells us, "in which a youthful enthusiasm that could have evaporated instead grew more powerful each year."

Clearly, this quest is motivated by a parallel search for his parents, the mother he never knew and the father he never understood. But what follows is a richly drawn search across Europe, guided by rare manuscripts, stray references in crumbling letters and clues fed to him by sympathetic librarians and collectors. Xeno walks "a road bound on the one side by history and on the other by a luminous shifting terrain defined by faith as well as facts." The provenance of "The Caravan Bestiary" provides a dizzying tour of medieval lore and amateur archaeology, wending through 700 tortuous years of intrigue, including Lord Byron, the Black Death, a seance and corrupt Roman Catholic officials. (Is it possible to read anything nowadays without catching a whiff of The Da Vinci Code?)

As Xeno's search for "The Caravan" draws him into the past, the novel moves through the major events of the mid-20th century, with a powerful section on the Vietnam War and the drug-addled disillusionment that followed. A clever subplot involving a biologist trying to save endangered animals from extinction draws these ancient and modern themes together.

Christopher includes a few dozen animals in the glossary, but his publisher should have sprinkled these fanciful beasts throughout the novel in color. Take a look at an American edition of Gould's Book of Fish (2002) by Richard Flanagan. Grove/Atlantic spent a fortune printing the text in different colors -- to reflect the narrator's handmade inks -- along with illustrations of his fish at the beginning of each chapter. It's a gorgeous, tasteful example of the way art can enhance a novel, and The Bestiary would have benefited from the same kind of attention.

In any case, if Christopher weren't such a careful writer, he could easily succumb to his aphoristic bent (and probably make a lot more money). His mournful narrator slips now and then into the Profound Mode: "Our illusions can ravage us as mercilessly as violence or disease. And the illusions of others, when they take on lives of their own, are even more dangerous." Back in my Jonathan Livingston Seagull days, I would have wanted that on a poster for my dorm room. The key to this strange novel's allure may be its tantalizing blend of tones: melancholic one moment and a little ridiculous the next. "In a world of infinite metamorphoses," Xeno asks, "who can cleanly separate the fantastical from the commonplace? Who would want to?" Christopher captures that adolescent thrill of falling into the mythological world and finding our deepest fears and desires embodied -- alive, frightening and fantastic. ·

Ron Charles is a senior editor of Book World. E-mail charlesr@washpost.com.