Barbara Gowdy, The White Bone

I read The White Bone not long after it was first published in 1998, and I re-read it last week. I have not read another novel like it, and recommend it to everyone. A capsulized description would be something like: A sad and heroic quest story written from the perspective of African elephants. Gowdy heavily researched the lives of these creatures, and she tried very hard to get into their heads, bodies, and culture for this story. Of course, if you are a human who populates your story with non-human animals, some  anthropomorphization is inevitable, and often it's the whole point. Watership Down, for example, is as I remember it a tale featuring rabbit characters who are a lot like humans. Gowdy is after something bigger here, but because we humans cannot actually get into the heads and bodies of other creatures, the results must be judged as an act of imagination, as literature. 

The philosopher Thomas Nagel's famous essay asked "What is it Like to Be a Bat?" and his conclusion as I understand it is: we simply can't know. Gowdy uses story-telling to try to convince you otherwise, at least for elephants. Humans, by the way, do figure in her story, and for the She-ones (elephants), it is we, fallen creatures, who are alien and inscrutable, not to mention cruel and dangerous. You can hardly blame them for thinking so.

De-extinction!

Professor Beth Shapiro of UCSC seems to have her heart in the right place, but c'mon, don't we all want to see woolly mammoths roaming Canada again, asap?

... elephants are highly social creatures and there is no reason to suspect that mammoths were not. One mammoth would be necessarily alone in the world. It could not be released into the freedom of the Arctic until there were many of them. Until we can make many mammoths without using elephants, to my mind it is ethically unsound.