New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press/Bloomsbury, 2018. 309 pages. $26.00.
Recently, I was walking through the large city park near my home at dusk. With beds of formal plantings, promenade paths, and picturesque gazebos, the park has a polite, nineteenth-century quality. There is a lily pond stocked with carp and a neatly fenced bird reserve where I often spot huddles of elderly birdwatchers, binoculars trained on upper boughs. On this evening, the park was nearly empty. The lengthening shadows and descending chill put a spring in my step. Just past a stone barn housing a retired Clydesdale, I suddenly felt observed. There, halfway out of the gloomy doorway, following my steps, was a red fox. I stopped. The fox took a few steps in my direction and sat back on its haunches with a puppyish plop. We regarded one another. It was bigger than I imagined foxes to be, though not large enough to be threatening. The fox yawned and ran its tongue over its bright teeth, rufous tail tracing an elegant curve on the ground. We were maybe ten yards from one another, everything copacetic so long as we maintained this distance, two beings under the edicts of an ancient bargain. After what felt like much longer than the ten seconds it probably was, the fox rose and trotted into the shadows. But our meeting has stayed with me. I’d stood at the border of something, looking into the eyes of that fox, a revelation that still tingles in my veins.
What a coincidence then, a few days after this encounter, to pick up a copy of Aminatta Forna’s Happiness, a book which concerns itself not only with the life and times of London’s urban foxes, but also with other anomalous wild trespassers into our urban landscape—coyotes, parakeets . . . even a whale is granted an unlikely (but based on true events) cameo, swimming up the Thames to its doom. The novel also explores the nature of borders, the often invisible and sometimes violently imposed boundaries between nation states, between groups and individuals, and between humankind and the rest of the natural world. It’s the last one that intrigued me most here. Although Happiness by no means disregards anthropocene concerns, it does raise alternatives to a strictly human literature, bringing to mind Paul Kingsnorth and the Dark Mountain writers with their call for a reconsideration of our place on the planet, as well as a recent complaint from the writer Joy Williams that “this obsessional looking at the human” could “bring about the death of literature.”
I’ll state flat-out that I don’t think this novel means to create a revolution. On its surface, Happiness follows Attila, a Ghanian psychiatrist specializing in war trauma and Jean, an American biologist with a grant to study London’s foxes—as they navigate turning points in their lives and deal with an unexpected investigation into a missing boy. Attila is as wonderful a character as you’re likely to meet in a novel this year (starting with that name), so tall that when we first see him he appears to be “wading through the crowd,” prone to exclaiming aloud to himself when he’s amused or perturbed, as world-weary as they come but also hungry as a tourist for the sights, sounds, and smells of wherever he happens to be. Forna gives us a lot of opportunities to spend time with Attila alone, doing the things he loves—attending the theater, listening to music, eating, and dancing. At a restaurant, Attila “said good evening to the people at the next table and picked up the menu to remind himself of the good things on offer. He ordered calves’ liver and bacon because both of these were hard to come by where he lived, and the potted brown shrimps because these too were a rare treat.” I found myself wishing I were across the table, sharing the meal. As often happens in novels with multiple protagonists, Jean pales a bit besides the hulking, engaging Attila, and Forna seems slightly less confident in her portrayal of this American woman (slip-up British-isms like one where Jean wonders whether or not her son may have a “friend round” detract, somewhat, from the believability of her voice). But it’s refreshing to read about two people past their prime, picking up the pieces of their careers and their romantic lives.
But it is through peripheral points of view that the novel opens up to the possibilities I mentioned above, such as in this moment where a young girl inside a high rise restaurant observes a peregrine falcon stooping to take a pigeon:
To the child the bird looked like a sky diver, falling through the air with outstretched arms: wings spread, beak down, feet angled backwards, its feathered body shivered and shook against the wind.
The passage goes on, and might be read as a tribute of sorts to J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine, a book in which the narrator so fully surrenders to the experience of observing an animal that by the end we wonder if he may have rendered his everyday existence unlivable. Forna allows similar ripples in the scrim between worlds (in moments like the above and also in longer, italicized chapters set in different eras and locales) providing surprises of a poetic and uncanny nature.
This is vital, since the plot, which focuses on the disappearance of a young Ghanian boy and the “will they or won’t they?” relationship between Attila and Jean (which begins with a meet cute right out of the glossiest of rom-coms) tends toward the conventional. Somehow the missing boy, the son of a friend of Attila’s family on the run from the law, feels oddly inconsequential, a distraction between meals during the book’s meandering days. As Attila and Jean subtly flirt, I found myself thinking, “Uh, hello people, the missing kid?” The novel might have benefited from the mother’s point of view, which would have provided a sense of immediacy and panic.
Happiness’s globalist worldview will reassure its readership—its heroes are the American expat, the doctor without borders, a plucky group of runaway-finding immigrants, and a skulk of scrappy, charmingly-named foxes using strategies of assimilation and camouflage to make a life for themselves in a world they never made. Its villains are rigid immigration laws, a right-wing radio host, and local bureaucrats who will pay for the pelts of vulpus vulpus, canis latran, canis lupus, even trees if they stand in the way of progress. It’s not too surprising when a certain politician looms into view with hair “. . . parted low on one side from where the mass of it surged forward like an ocean breaker onto the beach of his forehead where it was cast backwards onto the crown of his head, finally spilling over the back of his collar.”
But beyond familiar narratives, the anarchic lurks. For as Attila (and in the end, this is really his story) makes his peripatetic way through the city and along the pathways of his memories, resplendent with delights and dangers, he begins to question assumptions long taken for granted in his field, notions of happiness we in the Western world depend on, and have built our personal and civic lives around. Toward the end of the novel, Attila contemplates a society gone numb, “. . . the untouched, who were raised under glass, who had never felt the rain or the wind, had never been caught in a storm, or run from the thunder and lightning, could not bear to be reminded of their own mortality.” Animals, of course, operate under no such principles, thus their prominence here. With their creaturely assistance, Forna writes into the space between human / nature, a space where the novel shudders out of convention to reveal something wild.
