The Believer

A novelist with cerebral palsy, Amanda Leduc is preoccupied with how fabulist forms of storytelling can influence society’s perception of disability. “As a disabled person in the world, I didn’t feel like I could fit anywhere,” she told the Weird Era podcast in April. “What I try to do in all of my work is gently interrogate structures of the stories that we tell.” A plot-defying narrative that explores the boundaries between human and animal, her latest, Wild Life, asks, What does it mean to be whole?

The tale begins in early twentieth-century Scotland. Josiah, a neurotic, bespectacled young man who can communicate with animals, is forced to leave town with a Christian missionary expedition headed for Siberia. He’s sent by his skeptical father, who blames him for his mother’s death in a barn fire twenty years earlier. “May God show you beautiful things,” Papa calls to his son as he departs. “May He make a work of your new life.”

On the first day, Josiah meets Marcus, a mute. They become lovers, until a cataclysmic meteor strike kills everyone in the mission, save for Josiah, who is rescued by a creature “covered in orangey-brown fur with mottled dark spots.” He immediately believes that God has presented himself in four-legged form and chosen him to be a prophet, even as the creature snaps, “I am not your Lord.” The beast and its mate — named Barbara and Kendrith — are a pair of walking, talking hyenas, whom “the wind called” to bring Josiah back to Scotland. “Don’t you hear it?” they ask. “The wind calls you home.”

When Josiah returns, he founds the cultish Church of the Wild, whose mantra is “Whole bodies, whole selves.” He gathers pilgrims known as the Ladder-Days and tells them he will “heal the world, soul by wandering soul.” His grief over Marcus’s passing, however, leads him astray. “He thinks he can ignore it and teach other people to ignore it too,” Barbara says at one point. “He thinks that it makes him . . . an animal.” In 1935, Josiah dies mysteriously, never having overcome his sorrow. (Unknown creatures allegedly tear him apart.)

The novel ends in British Columbia in 2041, about 130 years after Josiah establishes his church. The believer base steadily grows, and Barbara and Kendrith reappear during times of need. Each chapter offers a snapshot of various interactions with the hyenas and the Ladder‑Days, showing the ways humans experience disability, grief, and transformation.

Josiah’s grandniece, Mhairi, teaches the hyenas how to bake shortbread and then abandons her family to become a chef in France. Decades later, her grandson, Theo, works on a train that “glides over the Atlantic on tracks anchored to the ocean floor,” from Lisbon to Boston. He meets Barbara and Kendrith on board before the Nautilus Express sinks, reportedly assailed by a giant squid. At another point, a man moves into a triplex in Vancouver and rents out a floor to the hyenas after he loses his wife to breast cancer (she may actually have disappeared with the Ladder-Days). And a renowned cellist from Toronto loses three fingers in a car accident and discovers his instrument can play itself. One episode follows another, and the effect proves dizzying, with new settings, individuals, and narrative threads jostling for space on the page and in the reader’s mind.

But the effect also proves delightful. Leduc’s prose shimmers with enchanting details, such as the rare blue tarantula that Theo discovers, “tucked into the angle between the bed’s alcove wall and the ceiling,” or the dove, who goes by Aviva, that emerges from where a character’s “left breast used to be.” There’s also Lizzie, a partially deaf woman who, in a violent but liberating act of self-defence, gnaws off her abusive ex-boyfriend’s cheek. Back home, safe with the hyenas, her face grows “narrow, blunt — part dog, part cat, part neither.”

The reader’s connection to these characters is meant to be less emotional, more intellectual. A chapter that takes the form of a heavy-handed research paper for a dissertation on the Ladder-Days, complete with footnotes and supervisor comments, underscores the novel’s central idea: “What does it mean to deny infirmity, to deny and bury grief? Does that denial create an alternative reality — in the most literal sense — in which one then lives? And how does the nature of that new reality — religion as social epidemic, as personal magic spell that casts its net over so many — in turn reflect the world around us?”

Wild Life is critical of religious zealotry and its handling of disability. The church may seek to fulfill the “wildest hope” of its congregants: that they might transcend whatever afflicts them, be it psychological trauma or a physical ailment, and evolve into a “higher state of consciousness,” shedding “the animal parts of ourselves.” But Leduc challenges such doctrine with characters whose rugged nature becomes essential to their arcs, and by the end, a kind of pantheism emerges. Indeed, how belief alters our views on disability is the oil burning beneath each fabulous, flickering storyline.