It was the night of the falling stars. She took him to the riverbank. They swam in the still, black water. They did not play. They were serious that night. They swam in circles around each other, very solemnly. Then they went to the shore, and instead of shaking himself on her, he lay beside her and licked the water from her body while she, on her back, let the stars fall, one, two, fourteen, a million, it seemed, falling on her, ready to burn her. Once she reached up to one, it seemed so close, but its brightness faded from her grasp, faded into the milky way.Such a typical Canadian love scene: falling stars and inky swims, sleeping on marsh grass and wakening to a "mysterious green flickering aurora". What is atypical is that the "she" in this scene is a staid librarian from Toronto, spending the summer archiving the contents of a remote island home that had been left to her Historical Institute, and the "he" of the scene is a tame black bear that came with the estate. I learned about this forgotten gem of Canadiana (it won the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction in 1976) from this article that refers to Bear as "the best Canadian novel of all time", and that was a reading challenge I couldn't resist.
At a scant 140 pages, Bear is packed with the Canadian (or at least Ontarian) experience -- from the uptightness of 1970's Toronto to the swarming blackflies and water-skiers of Northern Ontario Cottage Country; from the brief glimpse of genteel British immigrant-life of the mid-1800's to a solitary backwoods woman who runs traplines and tans hides for a living; from a hundred-year-old Native woman who converses with bears to a librarian's hopeful search for an annotated edition of Roughing it in the Bush -- this book couldn't be more Canadian if it was soaked in maple syrup and used as a puck in a street hockey shinny game (Car!). But all of that is just incidental -- this is the story of Lou: too smart, too independent, too undomesticated to find love, she has immersed herself in her work, and at 27, is considered past her prime (so many reviewers call Lou "middle-aged", but at 27?). Sent to Cary Island to archive the contents of its only home, Lou -- a city girl with no love for either nature or animals -- has a transformative experience that frees her from the unsatisfying gender politics of sexual relations.
Bear has enjoyed a surge in popularity based on this recent Imgur post, and although I can understand why a love affair between a woman and a bear makes for good internet smartassery, this book isn't really smutty or overly graphic. Gender issues (so much more urgent in the North America of 1976 than today, no matter what our culture of victimisation declares) are at the forefront as are the changing roles of women due to the sexual revolution -- Lou (a sexually ambiguous name is also enjoyed by the last owner of Cary Island, a woman named "Colonel" ) is no shy virgin and it is eventually revealed that she has had long affairs and one night stands, tried sex with women and inanimate objects, been told to have an abortion, and has a regular hookup with her boss. Self-supporting and with access to physical contact without messy domestic entanglements, Lou has come a long way Baby but, as I imagine was the case for some percentage of the early feminists, she found the lack of emotional connection to be coldly unsatisfying.
Yet, when the weather turned and the sun filtered into even her basement windows, when the sunbeams were laden with spring dust and the old tin ashtrays began to stink of a winter of nicotine and contemplation, the flaws in her plodding private world were made public, even to her, for although she loved old shabby things, things that had already been loved and suffered, objects with a past, when she saw that her arms were slug-pale and her fingerprints grained with old, old ink, that the detritus with which she bedizened her bulletin boards was curled and valueless, when she found that her eyes would no longer focus in the light, she was always ashamed, for the image of the Good Life long ago stamped on her soul was quite different from this, and she suffered in contrast.What works brilliantly in Bear is that what Lou eventually does find fulfilling comes from within herself, and to that end, it could only have been a nonhuman lover that elicited the change in a manner free from gender- and sexual-politics.
I am happy to have stumbled upon this book as it mixes so well with my regular reading interests: not only is this my third Canadian book with a starring bear this year -- along with The Bear and All the Broken Things-- but I recently read another novella ("The Seven-Ounce Man" from Julip) in which a character is determined to test the transformative power of sleeping outdoors under a bear skin. Although I don't know if there's authentic history to that belief, I was mindful of it as Lou spent the night wrapped in an actual bear. This book is more important than the Imgur-inspired mockery might suggest, but as that post led to the article I read, and as that led to me finding Bear, I will be grateful for serendipity in all its modes. Is it "the best Canadian novel of all time"? I'm not sure about that, but without knowing the competition, I'll agree with the GG jury and say Bear was no doubt the best Canadian book of 1976.
And to be more graphic in this more private forum, this is the first sexual encounter:
"Oh bear," she said, rubbing his neck. She got up and took her clothes off because she was hot. She lay down on the far side of the bear, away from the fire, and a little away from him and began to make love to herself.
The bear roused himself from his somnolence, shifted and turned. He put out his moley tongue. It was fat, and, as the Cyclopaedia says, vertically ridged. He began to lick her.
A fat, freckled, pink and black tongue. It licked. It rasped, to a degree. It probed. It felt very warm and good and strange. What the hell did Byron do with his bear? she wondered.
He licked. He probed. She might have been a flea he was searching for. He licked her nipples stiff and scoured her navel. With little nickerings she moved him south.
She swung her hips and made it easy for him.
"Bear, bear," she whispered, playing with his ears. The tongue that was muscular but also capable of lengthening itself like an eel found all her secret places. And like no human being she had ever known it persevered in her pleasure. When she came, she whimpered, and the bear licked away her tears.
The books I read don't tend to have explicit sex scenes, but so far as such things go, and in the context of this book itself, I don't find that offensive. In response to that newspaper article I linked to (and coincidentally, my Discus username over there is Mamabear, lol) some offended prude wrote: next Christmas season there'll be a book(s) to get your loved ones glorifying pedophelia too. Wonder if Ms. Keeler will be an advocate for that as well. I wanted to reply with some reference to Lolita (despite the pedophilia, considered the greatest English-language novel of all time...) but I wasn't spoiling for a comments sections fight. That day.
This alternate book cover seems to be unnecessarily salacious and contributed to the Imgur snickering:
