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Synopsis:

‘A strange and wonderful book, plausible as kitchens, but shapely as a folktale, and with the same disturbing resonance.’ – Margaret Atwood

Lou is a shy and diligent librarian at the local Heritage Institute. She works monotonous and dusty hours long into the night but she has found nothing – and no one – to go home to. She has resigned herself to passionless sex on her desk with the Director of the Institute.

When she is summoned to a remote island to inventory the estate of Colonel Cary, she takes it as an opportunity to get out of the city, hoping for an industrious summer of cataloguing.

Colonel Cary left many possessions behind, but she didn’t expect the bear. She soon begins to anticipate the bear’s needs for food and company. But as summer blossoms across the island and Lou shakes off the city, she realises the bear might satisfy some needs of her own.

Review:

In the Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man (2005), there is a part where Timothy Treadwell, a man who spent thirteen summers with the bears at Katmai National Park in Alaska, thought that he had a personal connection to the bears, had gained the trust and friendship of the grizzlies around him. In one of his home videos, he films a bear and he says he can see the bear’s friendship and compassion in it’s eyes. At this point, Herzog has a voiceover during the same scene. He says something to the effect that instead of the compassion and friendship that Treadwell sees, Herzog sees coldness and indifference the comes from the bears being wild animals.

I was constantly reminded of this scene while reading Bear by Marian Engel, a short novella from 1976 that has kind of resurfaced in some TikTok posts. Bear is the story of Lou, a librarian who catalogs things for the Institute. When the Institute is given the Colonel Cary Estate, she travels to the remote island to catalog it’s belongings and library. She gets there and learns that there is also a bear on a chain in the backyard that she has to feed. Lou and the bear quickly become closer than they should because she trusts his friendship and compassion. Lou’s behavior reminds me of naiveté of Timothy Treadwell, someone who feels like she has more of a connection to a wild animal than she actually does.

Bear is Marian Engel’s most popular book, but this is also her fifth novel. Reading Bear has made me extremely curious about her and her other books. There is something deeply disturbing and haunting about not only the plot of this book and the character of Lou but also the way that it is written. She tells the story of Lou in a poetic but also sad way, where we can feel the isolation that Lou feels in her life. This loneliness seeps into every aspect of Lou’s life, from her job to being on an island alone for an entire summer with a bear to the way that Lou should not have been put into this situation. Bear won the Governor General’s Award in 1976, which is Canada’s equivalent to the National Book Award, so this bizarre novel was at least critically well-received, which also brings up more questions, particularly what  was going on with novels in Canada in the 70s. I need to know more about the award winning Canadian books at this time and about the life and works of Marian Engel.