A brief survey of my one-year-old’s bookshelf reveals a plethora of books about animals: crocodiles, cows, sheep and rabbits (so many rabbits). In truth these creatures are humans in disguise, or at least they embody qualities that are distinctly human; it is purely in their surface – their fur or scales or hair – that they resemble animals. As John Berger wrote back in 1980, they are but “human puppets”, creatures whom we ventriloquise. Like animals in zoos, or large mice inhabited by underpaid and hot theme-park workers, they represent not our proximity, but our estrangement from what Berger calls “the first circle of what surrounded man”, that is animals. Talk about ruining a bedtime story, John.
The cover and endpapers of Chloe Dalton’s debut, Raising Hare (beautifully illustrated by Denise Nestor) at first seem to resemble these children’s books: there are no rabbits, but hares, doing what hares do: inspecting berries, leaping, boxing, feeding young and gazing outward, apparently, towards the reader. The story of this excellent book is in one sense familiar: a narrator, experiencing a rupture or crisis, is transformed through a magical encounter with a “wild” creature, a hare. But there is much more going on here. As hare and narrator enter into conversation, their strange dialogue begins to shed light on our relationship with our non-human neighbours, bringing into question assumptions about control, consent, boundaries and autonomy. Unlike my daughter’s books, this is a sustained and patient attempt to cross the species abyss, and to see the world through the hare’s eyes.
