Feral City

The last time I stood on a subway platform in Toronto, I noticed a soot-grey mouse foraging for goodness knows what in the tracks. Sad little sight. But nature is enterprising in the modern city—and, it seems, increasingly diverse. Within Ottawa’s limits I have been surprised by muskrats, foxes and deer. This summer at the eastern edge a moose blundered into a schoolyard and got itself shot. To the south the coyote population is sufficiently brash to bring the trappers out. In fact, this particular character is raising human hackles across North America—as Orion magazine recently reported, Canis latrans is “the new dog in town.”

What a pleasure to find in Fauna, Alissa York’s latest novel, such a tenderly observed inventory of a city’s feral denizens, from subway mice to red-tailed hawks. In fact, her species count ranges widely in time and terrain: associated with almost every scene, character, back story and memory (and with a good many metaphors) is a creature of some kind—turtle or tarantula, cougar or tabby cat.

In York’s previous novels, animals are always within close range of her characters’ material and emotional lives. Sacrificial, archetypal, powerful and transcendent, they are both a parallel order of being and a point of connection with humanity’s primal side. In Mercy, a gentle butcher carves up animals with a strange but respectful intimacy, while the wisest character lives on the edge of society, attuned to such arcana as vole skulls and the stomach contents of owls. York’s historical novel, Effigy, centres on a Mormon homesteader and his four wives, of whom the most intriguing is a taxidermist. While her husband fabricates exploits for his “kill book,” she immortalizes the victims of his vanity. To some degree, these two characters embody the conflicting attributes of the 19th-century naturalist: Audubon’s birds, let us remind ourselves, are nature morte, for he was incapable of drawing a creature while it was alive. (Even now, the conservationist-hunter survives as a respectable species of animal lover.)

Set in Toronto in 2008, Fauna shows us something about the animal-human interface in our own time. York’s loosely centred narrative begins with Edal, a federal wildlife officer driven to stress leave by an excess of dismay: her job with Customs involves detecting smuggled animals and their body parts. By chance she encounters Lily, a teenager whose fragility and resilience are mirrored in the migratory birds that she collects from downtown sidewalks. These casualties of night-lit skyscrapers are revived (or else buried) in the curious haven of an auto wrecker’s yard, whose proprietor, Guy, seems capable of “whispering” any living thing. Guy provides flight training for an injured hawk, employment for Stephen (raccoon rescuer and veteran of the Afghan war), a burial service for roadkill and a place to hang out. Last to join the inner circle is Kate, a veterinary physiotherapist. Each of these wounded characters finds under Guy’s easygoing protection a space in which to heal. But close to their refuge, on the edge of an urban wilderness, a darker influence is on the prowl. Sighted through his blog on the internet, the self-styled Coyote Cop patrols the Don Valley, preparing to do harm.

Moving from character to character, flashback to present scene, York’s intersecting narrative—from the Bloor Street viaduct, Coyote Cop observes “a girl and her dog” on the path below; from the Riverdale footbridge, Edal sees a “solitary runner” in the trees—would play out wonderfully on film, layering in space and time the possibilities for connection, community and danger in Toronto’s tangled habitat. More difficult to render, perhaps, would be the layer of interconnection laid down through the stories that York’s characters share and recall. Guy reads to the group from Kipling’s Jungle Book, and lends Lily his copy of Watership Down. Coyote Cop’s grandmother once read to him, in secret, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Edal was named by her book-hoarding mother after an otter in Ring of Bright Water. For many a child, imaginative entrance into not only the natural world but also the human domain of moral action is made through stories with animal protagonists. York’s reading list within a novel pays homage to such works, but she also offers her own version of the genre, interrupting the quietly unfolding human episodes with interludes from the perspective of raccoon, fox, skunk, bat—and coyote. This technique recalls the dream sequences in Effigy, in which terrible human events are revealed from the vantage point of a crow. The animal narratives in Fauna, however, are not visionary sequences but, rather, naturalistic depictions of a specied logic that owe something to the “personal histories” recounted in Ernest Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known (which Lily also borrows from Guy’s library). Although York’s animals are not stand-ins for humans, and in that sense are not anthropomorphized, their interpreter’s first language, clearly, is human.

Perhaps our empathy for animals requires a sentimentalizing habit, at least as a starting point from which we may develop something wiser. It is easiest for us to respond to perceived attributes and motivations—cunning, loyalty, hunger, fear—that seem like our own. Consider Lily’s response to Seton’s Raggylug: “The scene was mushy as hell—the fluffy baby bunny screaming Mammy, Mammy, as the snake tightened its grip—but when the mother rabbit came bounding to save the day, Lily found she had to stop reading and wait for the blur in her eyes to clear.” Humanized interpretations extend even to our forgiveness of a predator’s “nature.” Thus Guy condones a hungry dog’s capture of a rabbit and feeds mice (fresh or frozen) to his hawk: there is no malice in nature, only necessity. To forgive a human predator, on the other hand, we look for some explanatory damage, a trauma that made human nature go wrong.

The three-metre wall of chain link that encloses Guy’s junkyard protects an enchanted kingdom; the initiated let themselves in with a key, like storybook children gaining entrance to a secret garden. Their friendships are fortuitous, brought about by a coincidence of interest that involves the almost-instant exchange of names and of trust that one finds in young readers’ adventure novels. Jennifer Lum’s design evokes the feel of a well-worn children’s novel: the deckle-cut pages, generous binding and decorative features invite the reader into story hour’s comfy chair. Even York’s chapter titles give a nod to the novels that inhabit her characters’ imaginative life—”The City Book,” “Chronicles of Darius” and “Ring of Dark Timber.” Their stories are propelled by adult themes, nonetheless: Edal is dealing with depression, Lily with gender identity, Stephen with feelings of inadequacy, perhaps, and narrative tension builds as real or virtual relationships with Guy, Kate and Coyote Cop, respectively, lead each of these characters out of an impasse.

In the aggregate, I think it is fair to say that this novel’s themes and devices are rather overdone. But there is much to enjoy and admire in the specificity of York’s Toronto, her clearly visualized embodiment of character and her warm portrayal of friendships off the beaten track. Although some outcomes seem like a foregone conclusion, in the final scenes York shows that she has not lost the talent for dramatic surprise so powerfully exercised in her earlier work. Not for nothing is Coyote, the Trickster, at the centre of it all.