The Boston Globe, June 21, 2010
A Novel Indictment of Factory Farming
By Thrity Umrigar
Some books we love; others we admire. Don LePan’s debut novel, Animals, falls firmly in the second category.
In an unusually candid author’s afterword, LePan confesses that his intention in writing the novel was to draw attention to the barbarity of the practice of factory farming. Not that we need the afterword. Although set 100 years into the future, the entire novel is a thinly disguised rant about the horrors of contemporary large-scale farms where animals are raised in inhumane conditions.
The central conceit involves the coming of an era of great extinctions when all the animals that humans once consumed have been wiped out. Society has created a category of sub-humans, known as the mongrels, those who are “defective’’ in some way. To meet their craving for meat, humans have started to fatten and then consume the mongrels, often by the time they are 10 or 11 years old.
There are not too many authors who can pull off a novel that is essentially about adults feeding on their human young. But LePan has an affectless, dispassionate writing style, and he convincingly paints a picture of a callous, self-serving, dystopian world. The novel operates at two levels — first, there is the regular narrative, about Sam, a young mongrel abandoned by his destitute mother. Sam is taken in by Carrie and Zayne Stinton after their daughter Naomi finds him on their doorstep and begs her parents to “adopt’’ him as a pet. But Carrie is never quite at ease with Naomi’s growing attachment to Sam and commits an impulsive act that has lasting reverberations. Sam’s eventual plight, of course, is meant to symbolize the desperate plight of animals at the large agro-industrial farms of today.
Not trusting his reader to glean the symbolic meaning of his narrative, LePan continually interrupts this main story line with a parallel narrative, which purports to be a scholarly, historical overview of life in the aftermath of the great extinctions, a description of the willfully blind ways in which society operates, and the multitude of everyday cruelties it afflicts upon its most powerless members.
As you’ve probably gathered by now, Animals ain’t exactly summer beach reading. Indeed, LePan doesn’t seem all that interested in standard literary techniques such as plot and character development. The story, such as it is, exists only to illuminate the message of the book. This is a political tract disguised as a novel and LePan offers no apologies for this.
There are not too many authors who can pull off a novel that is essentially about adults feeding on their human young. But LePan has an affectless, dispassionate writing style, and he convincingly paints a picture of a callous, self-serving, dystopian world. The novel operates at two levels — first, there is the regular narrative, about Sam, a young mongrel abandoned by his destitute mother. Sam is taken in by Carrie and Zayne Stinton after their daughter Naomi finds him on their doorstep and begs her parents to “adopt’’ him as a pet. But Carrie is never quite at ease with Naomi’s growing attachment to Sam and commits an impulsive act that has lasting reverberations. Sam’s eventual plight, of course, is meant to symbolize the desperate plight of animals at the large agro-industrial farms of today.
Not trusting his reader to glean the symbolic meaning of his narrative, LePan continually interrupts this main story line with a parallel narrative, which purports to be a scholarly, historical overview of life in the aftermath of the great extinctions, a description of the willfully blind ways in which society operates, and the multitude of everyday cruelties it afflicts upon its most powerless members.
As you’ve probably gathered by now, Animals ain’t exactly summer beach reading. Indeed, LePan doesn’t seem all that interested in standard literary techniques such as plot and character development. The story, such as it is, exists only to illuminate the message of the book. This is a political tract disguised as a novel and LePan offers no apologies for this.
And yet, almost despite itself, the novel achieves moments of grace. LePan has an astute understanding of the contradictions and weaknesses of human nature. His portrayal of the weak, confused Zayne and the indomitable Carrie is particularly trenchant. And the scenes of Sam in the pen where the mongrels are taken to await slaughter are harrowing. Despite his inability to speak, Sam’s humanity comes across to us as clearly as it does to Naomi, and so the ending packs an emotional wallop.
There is something admirable about a novel that does not want to be loved, that simply wants to be read and discussed. Animals may not be a book you recommend to your best friends as a must-read. But it will most certainly make you look at that steak on your dinner plate a little
differently.
Thrity Umrigar is the author of a memoir and four novels, including the best-selling “The Space Between Us,’’ and her recent novel, “The Weight of Heaven.’’
There is something admirable about a novel that does not want to be loved, that simply wants to be read and discussed. Animals may not be a book you recommend to your best friends as a must-read. But it will most certainly make you look at that steak on your dinner plate a little
differently.
Thrity Umrigar is the author of a memoir and four novels, including the best-selling “The Space Between Us,’’ and her recent novel, “The Weight of Heaven.’’
Publishers Weekly: June 2010
Animals
At the center of this dystopian novel lies a philosophical premise: that the line between human and animal is too unclear to justify inhumane treatment of the latter--whether pet or farm animal. In a twenty-second century America, a combination of mass extinction and economic hardship has led people to look for an alternate source of meat: disabled human beings, stripped of their humanity, who are either kept as pets or farmed, with cruel efficiency, as food. Sam is one such person, a deaf child abandoned by his mother and adopted as a pet. The "found manuscript" that tells his story, and the accompanying scholarly commentary, paint a convincing picture of moral decline and ethical inconsistency on a devastating scale. Though at times heavy-handed, Animals nonetheless has the moral clarity and narrative drive of the best of the genre. LePan's vision is extreme, and though he focuses more on the evils of factory farming than on vegan evangelism, some may find it off-putting. But even those who might disagree with his thesis will be compelled by the implications of this well-plotted and formally audacious tale.
Animals
At the center of this dystopian novel lies a philosophical premise: that the line between human and animal is too unclear to justify inhumane treatment of the latter--whether pet or farm animal. In a twenty-second century America, a combination of mass extinction and economic hardship has led people to look for an alternate source of meat: disabled human beings, stripped of their humanity, who are either kept as pets or farmed, with cruel efficiency, as food. Sam is one such person, a deaf child abandoned by his mother and adopted as a pet. The "found manuscript" that tells his story, and the accompanying scholarly commentary, paint a convincing picture of moral decline and ethical inconsistency on a devastating scale. Though at times heavy-handed, Animals nonetheless has the moral clarity and narrative drive of the best of the genre. LePan's vision is extreme, and though he focuses more on the evils of factory farming than on vegan evangelism, some may find it off-putting. But even those who might disagree with his thesis will be compelled by the implications of this well-plotted and formally audacious tale.
The Globe and Mail, Saturday October 24, 2009
Getting to the meat of the matter
by Jim Bartley
Don LePan's book is a spot-on analysis of the human capacity to reconcile sentiment with savagery
This summer, I enjoyed a grilled mutton lunch next to a Bosnian sheep meadow. I had watched my lunch trot out on its daily outings to the same meadow. Later, I had watched my friends lead the animal to a grassy plot behind their house. There was a moment of struggle, blood, then speedy death. Inevitably, it led to comparisons with the flesh I eat in Canada and the news from factory farms. Like many, I'm good at suppressing such thoughts. Then Don LePan's novel turned up on my doorstep.
It's the near future. Near enough that there are still things like rusty Hondas belonging to inner-city moms who wonder how they'll keep the kids fed, let alone a hungry pet. Tammy has four children and one mongrel: Sam. Sam is not a dog. In this world, mongrels form a subset of humans. Some families are torn about what to do with their mongrel kids. Sam, luckier than some, ate people food at a people table until he became too much of an embarrassment. Now, he eats pet food by himself in a corner of the kitchen. His food may even contain ground-up mongrel – but moms try not to think about that. The mongrel content in Sam's food is the result of a global shortage of protein, because all the cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and other farmed creatures are extinct.
Sam looks and thinks like a human (we observe sometimes through his viewpoint), but he can't speak, or care for himself to the usual human standard. He can seem, even to his own family, more animal than person. In LePan's dystopic allegory, he ranks well below even Aldous Huxley's menial Epsilons in value and utility. Where compassion for mongrels still hangs on is in the moms, but we can predict who gets sacrificed in a crisis.
Tammy, her household economy in free fall, is forced to make a terrible choice: Keep Sam and jeopardize her family's health and future, or place him elsewhere. With overdue rent bearing down on her, she and the kids skip town early one morning, leaving Sam wrapped in blankets at the door of well-to-do neighbours.
Sam's story alternates with extensive backstory from his brother Broderick, who offers the “big picture” of how the world has come to such a pass. The scenario is nightmarish. As the 21st century advanced, mongrel births, blamed on pollution, mushroomed to one out of five. With food animals extinct from rampant drug dosing and filth-induced epidemics, an orchestrated ethical shift led to mongrels being redefined as “chattels” – edible property. Technology and commerce exploited the new and stable protein source. Unable to reproduce, most food mongrels were cloned. The residue were, are, creatures like Sam: kids with mothers, yet a legal hair's breadth from becoming meat.
This is an angry book, its characters always in service to the anguished message. As an analysis of the human capacity to reconcile sentiment with savagery, it's spot on: psychologically incisive, admirably disquieting. Still, the novel's challenges are not always productive. Broderick himself anticipates readers' response: “I have no doubt spent far too long on the history and the economics … when I know that what many of you are interested in is the narrative of individual lives.”
He's right. Part of the bog-down is the frequent footnotes, up to a half-page long, filled with textbook-ish historical detail, cultural analysis, market tracking and so on. The book's fictional meat (or tofu) is crowded by editorial starch.
Animals will leave some readers lagging, but they should persist. LePan may openly grind his axe, but what makes the book powerful is just how keenly that axe cuts through our ethical hypocrisy.
Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.
The Montreal Review of Books—fall 2009
Animals
by Dimitri Nasrallah
For his debut novel Animals, Broadview Press founder Don LePan has written a speculative fiction that looks into our not-so-bright future. LePan's vision is stark: all the farmable animals we know are dead, and so we've begun to eat our own. The civic and capitalist forces that have previously ground out livestock now work together to demote a sub-class of human into food. These "mongrels," incidentally, have either too many or too few chromosomes.
Animals is fearless and cynical that way, and reading it will make you think twice before pulling that steak out of the freezer for tonight's dinner. The premise alone is enough to make a compelling case for rethinking how our meat is raised and treated. But the narrative has multiple levels, and LePan is very keen to make his argument irrefutable. Though he ultimately succeeds, he sometimes overshoots his mark along the way.
In Animals, there is the story, which involves a young mongrel named Sam Clark, and then there is the story of the story, in which his older brother Broderick Clark recounts the conditions that make Sam's odyssey so speculatively futuristic. Sam is the mongrel society wants to eat. He is the emotional heart of the story; he's our front line in this world of the future. His brother Broderick is the novel's head.
The novel is delivered as two manuscripts. The first is the autobiographical writing of writer Naomi Okun, who as a girl discovered the toddler Sam bundled up on her porch after his mother could no longer afford to keep him. The second features Broderick's extensive essay on the industry and legalities of mongrel farming, and the details of how the future world could have devolved to such a state. There are copious footnotes added to the second manuscript. Broderick obviously knows a lot about the mass-farming industry, as does LePan, and the reader can't help but feel that the character is little more than a mouthpiece for the author.
It's not as if these industry specifics are strictly necessary for the enjoyment of the central story. Sam's life as Naomi's pet, and the divisions his presence exposes in the attitudes of her parents carry manifest social implications about what it means to be human in an age when a definition can turn a human into food. Here, LePan's storytelling skills are on full display and the narrative brims with tension.
So it's with some reluctance that the reader continuously breaks away from this more successful half of the novel to read the university-style lecture delivered by Broderick. The driving purpose behind all speculative fiction is ultimately the blend of story and argumentation. In Animals, that blend is denied. LePan has charged Sam with providing the fiction, while his brother has been handed the responsibility of doing the speculation.
Despite its structural issues, Animals is a brave and frequently fascinating debut novel, wrought with painful choices, harrowing journeys, and a deep passion for its subject matter. LePan has proven admirably that he has the chops to write a successful novel, or a work of non-fiction on the future of meat. One hopes that next time he won't shoehorn them both into the same book.
Dimitri Nasrallah is a novelist and music journalist.
The Montreal Gazette, The Victoria Times-Colonist, The National Post, The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix (January 2, 10, 23 and February 6, 2010 respectively)
Novel Depicts a Time When Monsters are all too Human
by Anne Chudobiak
Tammy, her household economy in free fall, is forced to make a terrible choice: Keep Sam and jeopardize her family's health and future, or place him elsewhere. With overdue rent bearing down on her, she and the kids skip town early one morning, leaving Sam wrapped in blankets at the door of well-to-do neighbours.
Sam's story alternates with extensive backstory from his brother Broderick, who offers the “big picture” of how the world has come to such a pass. The scenario is nightmarish. As the 21st century advanced, mongrel births, blamed on pollution, mushroomed to one out of five. With food animals extinct from rampant drug dosing and filth-induced epidemics, an orchestrated ethical shift led to mongrels being redefined as “chattels” – edible property. Technology and commerce exploited the new and stable protein source. Unable to reproduce, most food mongrels were cloned. The residue were, are, creatures like Sam: kids with mothers, yet a legal hair's breadth from becoming meat.
This is an angry book, its characters always in service to the anguished message. As an analysis of the human capacity to reconcile sentiment with savagery, it's spot on: psychologically incisive, admirably disquieting. Still, the novel's challenges are not always productive. Broderick himself anticipates readers' response: “I have no doubt spent far too long on the history and the economics … when I know that what many of you are interested in is the narrative of individual lives.”
He's right. Part of the bog-down is the frequent footnotes, up to a half-page long, filled with textbook-ish historical detail, cultural analysis, market tracking and so on. The book's fictional meat (or tofu) is crowded by editorial starch.
Animals will leave some readers lagging, but they should persist. LePan may openly grind his axe, but what makes the book powerful is just how keenly that axe cuts through our ethical hypocrisy.
Jim Bartley is The Globe and Mail's first-fiction reviewer.
The Montreal Review of Books—fall 2009
Animals
by Dimitri Nasrallah
For his debut novel Animals, Broadview Press founder Don LePan has written a speculative fiction that looks into our not-so-bright future. LePan's vision is stark: all the farmable animals we know are dead, and so we've begun to eat our own. The civic and capitalist forces that have previously ground out livestock now work together to demote a sub-class of human into food. These "mongrels," incidentally, have either too many or too few chromosomes.
Animals is fearless and cynical that way, and reading it will make you think twice before pulling that steak out of the freezer for tonight's dinner. The premise alone is enough to make a compelling case for rethinking how our meat is raised and treated. But the narrative has multiple levels, and LePan is very keen to make his argument irrefutable. Though he ultimately succeeds, he sometimes overshoots his mark along the way.
In Animals, there is the story, which involves a young mongrel named Sam Clark, and then there is the story of the story, in which his older brother Broderick Clark recounts the conditions that make Sam's odyssey so speculatively futuristic. Sam is the mongrel society wants to eat. He is the emotional heart of the story; he's our front line in this world of the future. His brother Broderick is the novel's head.
The novel is delivered as two manuscripts. The first is the autobiographical writing of writer Naomi Okun, who as a girl discovered the toddler Sam bundled up on her porch after his mother could no longer afford to keep him. The second features Broderick's extensive essay on the industry and legalities of mongrel farming, and the details of how the future world could have devolved to such a state. There are copious footnotes added to the second manuscript. Broderick obviously knows a lot about the mass-farming industry, as does LePan, and the reader can't help but feel that the character is little more than a mouthpiece for the author.
It's not as if these industry specifics are strictly necessary for the enjoyment of the central story. Sam's life as Naomi's pet, and the divisions his presence exposes in the attitudes of her parents carry manifest social implications about what it means to be human in an age when a definition can turn a human into food. Here, LePan's storytelling skills are on full display and the narrative brims with tension.
So it's with some reluctance that the reader continuously breaks away from this more successful half of the novel to read the university-style lecture delivered by Broderick. The driving purpose behind all speculative fiction is ultimately the blend of story and argumentation. In Animals, that blend is denied. LePan has charged Sam with providing the fiction, while his brother has been handed the responsibility of doing the speculation.
Despite its structural issues, Animals is a brave and frequently fascinating debut novel, wrought with painful choices, harrowing journeys, and a deep passion for its subject matter. LePan has proven admirably that he has the chops to write a successful novel, or a work of non-fiction on the future of meat. One hopes that next time he won't shoehorn them both into the same book.
Dimitri Nasrallah is a novelist and music journalist.
The Montreal Gazette, The Victoria Times-Colonist, The National Post, The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix (January 2, 10, 23 and February 6, 2010 respectively)
Novel Depicts a Time When Monsters are all too Human
by Anne Chudobiak
When Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale, she didn't take kindly to the label of science fiction, eventually telling the Guardian, "Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen."
Apply her definitions to Nanaimo writer Don LePan's first novel, and it becomes clear why Animals is so disturbing: the monsters are all-too-recognizably human.
Animals depicts a terrifying future not too many generations down the road. Because of factory farming, most of the animals we use for food have gone extinct: "The diseases wouldn't have spread so quickly if the creatures hadn't been packed thousands upon thousands together in feedlots."
Tofu is still readily available, and people do eat it, but not happily. Its reputation as a protein source has been tarnished by years of negative campaigning by the meat and dairy industries. The competitors are gone, but their message -- that soy poses some kind of health danger -- lives on.
The solution stems from another societal change. More babies are being born with abnormalities. But the economy has collapsed, and where once there were insufficient resources to help people with such problems, there is now a near-total lack of desire. Children with special needs are simply seen as belonging to another species called "mongrel." The lucky ones are raised as pets; unlucky ones are consigned to feedlots. Children with special needs are the new meat.
The story revolves around Sam, a boy who is mistaken for a mongrel and abandoned by his family.
Animals is a novel, yes, but it is also an unabashed call to arms for the animal-rights movement. It has almost as much in common with Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation as it does with The Handmaid's Tale. There is a lot of fact in this fiction, some of it inelegantly inserted as long-winded, scholarly footnotes: "Between 1900 and 1950 meat became relatively more expensive; the prices of flour and sugar went up by about four times, while the price of hamburger went up by about six times. Between 1950 and 2000, the half-century in which factory farming took over, that pattern was reversed."
It's as though LePan, 55, founder of an academic press and son of novelist Douglas LePan (whose 1964 book The Deserter beat out Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel for a Governor General's Award), is channelling two very different literary lineages: scholarly and fictional. Unfortunately, Don LePan doesn't know his own strengths. If he had kept with Sam's enchantingly horrifying orphan's tale, I might have been shamed into changing my meat-eating ways. But the scholarly interruptions detract from the story, weakening its emotional impact and its message that our choices at the grocery store can relieve or engender unconscionable suffering
Note: This review has appeared under various headlines:
A Stomach-Turning Future (Montreal Gazette)
Long Footnotes Spoil Good Story (Times-Colonist)
A Dystopian Vision, Complete With Footnotes (National Post)
Novel Depicts a Time when Monsters are all Too Human (Saskatoon Star-Phoenix)
Animals depicts a terrifying future not too many generations down the road. Because of factory farming, most of the animals we use for food have gone extinct: "The diseases wouldn't have spread so quickly if the creatures hadn't been packed thousands upon thousands together in feedlots."
Tofu is still readily available, and people do eat it, but not happily. Its reputation as a protein source has been tarnished by years of negative campaigning by the meat and dairy industries. The competitors are gone, but their message -- that soy poses some kind of health danger -- lives on.
The solution stems from another societal change. More babies are being born with abnormalities. But the economy has collapsed, and where once there were insufficient resources to help people with such problems, there is now a near-total lack of desire. Children with special needs are simply seen as belonging to another species called "mongrel." The lucky ones are raised as pets; unlucky ones are consigned to feedlots. Children with special needs are the new meat.
The story revolves around Sam, a boy who is mistaken for a mongrel and abandoned by his family.
Animals is a novel, yes, but it is also an unabashed call to arms for the animal-rights movement. It has almost as much in common with Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation as it does with The Handmaid's Tale. There is a lot of fact in this fiction, some of it inelegantly inserted as long-winded, scholarly footnotes: "Between 1900 and 1950 meat became relatively more expensive; the prices of flour and sugar went up by about four times, while the price of hamburger went up by about six times. Between 1950 and 2000, the half-century in which factory farming took over, that pattern was reversed."
It's as though LePan, 55, founder of an academic press and son of novelist Douglas LePan (whose 1964 book The Deserter beat out Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel for a Governor General's Award), is channelling two very different literary lineages: scholarly and fictional. Unfortunately, Don LePan doesn't know his own strengths. If he had kept with Sam's enchantingly horrifying orphan's tale, I might have been shamed into changing my meat-eating ways. But the scholarly interruptions detract from the story, weakening its emotional impact and its message that our choices at the grocery store can relieve or engender unconscionable suffering
Note: This review has appeared under various headlines:
A Stomach-Turning Future (Montreal Gazette)
Long Footnotes Spoil Good Story (Times-Colonist)
A Dystopian Vision, Complete With Footnotes (National Post)
Novel Depicts a Time when Monsters are all Too Human (Saskatoon Star-Phoenix)
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