Early on in Beastly: A New History of Animals and Us, Carew tells a story about her first trip to London Zoo as a child. She was confused and unsettled by the sight of the wild animals in their cages and instead fixated on a magpie that was hopping along the path in front of her, carefree and unrestricted. When it flew away she couldn’t bear it. “I wanted to go home,” Carew writes, “like the animals couldn’t.” It’s a blunt line that tells so much about the author and the chapters to come.
Carew is an artist who has lived in various places, including Auckland, Barcelona and West Cork. Almost a decade ago she and her husband bought 16 acres of land in Wiltshire and established a nature reserve, restoring habitat for species such as dragonflies, bats and barn owls. In 2016 she published her first book, Dadland, a dynamic account of her father’s extraordinary life that won the Costa biography award. It was followed by Quicksand Tales: The Misadventures of Keggie Carew, another unconventional memoir.
Carew has a jaunty, alluring style of writing, a caustic sense of humour and a gift when it comes to delivering hefty information with lightness and wit. In a short section devoted to Elon Musk and the colonisation of outer space, she asks: “What more wonder did we want? I mean, what I am trying to say is we have a lot of work to do here SO STOP PISSING ABOUT WITH SPACESHIPS TO MARS.”
In spite of how charmingly she writes, there is nothing light about Carew’s research nor her intellectual and emotional investment in her subject. This book is the product of years of rigorous work and boundless devotion to the minutia. Beastly begins roughly around woolly mammoths and ends roughly around the Covid-19 pandemic but is structured according to the pattern of the author’s thoughts as opposed to chronology. As a result it never feels like a plodding history.
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One moment we have Charles Darwin, the next we have the 2020 Netflix documentary, My Octopus Teacher. Carew tells illuminating stories of scientific discovery and of how animals and human culture are inextricable. She even pauses to contemplate a tin of sardines. Much emphasis is placed upon the people who dedicated their lives to studying animal behaviour and protecting endangered species from annihilation.
Carew covers Gilbert White, Rachel Carson, Jane Goodall. She travels to an ancient forest in Poland to explore the remarkable life of a woman who lived in a cabin alongside the wild animals she rescued. Then there’s the Indian naturalist who hand-reared leopard cubs in an attempt to re-establish a native population, and the two neuroscientists who discovered that rats laugh, but at such a high frequency it is inaudible to humans.
Carew complains bitterly about what she calls the ‘Tidy Disease’ – her rural neighbours’ obsession with keeping their gardens neatly clipped and sprayed with pesticides and stripped of life
From the beginning there is light and shade but at a certain point I felt the book slide into a darkness it could not come back from. Here is what animals mean to us, Carew is saying, now here is what we are doing to them. No honest new history can escape the tragedy of the latter chapters. Though I had considered myself generally well-informed, I was continually startled by facts I had not known – that sheep, for example, will “call out to photos of their friends”. In a section on the horrors of intensive factory farming, Carew writes that “our weight accounts for 36 per cent of the biomass of all mammals on this planet, the animals we eat take up 60 per cent, which leaves the mammals of the wild world, just 4 per cent.’
Carew is particularly passionate about highlighting habitat loss, ecosystem destruction and the interdependency of all life forms. She complains bitterly about what she calls the “Tidy Disease” – her rural neighbours’ obsession with keeping their gardens neatly clipped and sprayed with pesticides and stripped of life. “Our banners must shout more expansively ...” she writes, “Save the whale! Save the krill! Save the phytoplankton! Save everything in-between!”
Close to the end Carew poignantly describes solastalgia – “the type of homesickness that you can feel when you are still at home”, circling back to the enigmatic loneliness that she had first experienced in London Zoo as a child. It’s a term that has come to prominence in recent years as it dawns on us humans that “home can be your street and your planet”.
Over and again I felt that Carew had written Beastly just for people like me – who care, but think they know more than they do, and do not naturally gravitate toward scientific tomes. If you are interested in the animal kingdom; if you are interested in the past, present and future of planet Earth; if you are interested in anything at all – then this gorgeous, joyous, sobering book is for you.
Sara Baume has been shortlisted for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize for her third novel, Seven Steeples (Tramp Press)
