Bear

"Yes, it’s always been quite controversial! But also prize-winning. It won the Governor General’s Award in Canada in 1976 when it was published. It does have a real seventies vibe, I think, but I like that. It’s about Lou, a woman asked to catalogue a library in a house on a fairly remote Canadian island. She journeys there by boat, and the house is beautifully ornate. That’s the other thing about this novella—the house is so vivid. You think she’ll be travelling to a cabin, but it’s a house made of gold. Anyway, behind the house where she’ll live for the summer, is a bear. “She said she meant no symbolism. It’s just, genuinely, that Lou takes a bear as her lover” Lou knows nothing about animals. At first the bear is tied up on a chain, but she eventually gets to know him, and goes swimming with him, and then she invites him into the house, and they sit by the fire. The bear is described as a wild animal—Engel doesn’t anthropomorphise him—and then Lou begins a sexual relationship with this bear. Some readers are still shocked by this, if you look at Goodreads or other reviews. But I didn’t find the sexual scenes lurid, or gratuitous; I thought they were very well realised and completely part of the story. I actually found Lou’s relationship with the bear really moving. It all felt true—while still being odd to have sex with a bear. But for me the novella is about Lou discovering herself and what she wants from life. By the end she realises she can be her own woman and make her own choices. It feels completely possible. I went along with it utterly. There has been an awful lot of analysis about the metaphor and symbolism in this book. It was actually on school reading lists in Canada for a time, so it was widely discussed. Engel herself said that she was ‘just typing.’ She was writing about a woman cataloguing a library, and she wanted to introduce a lover, and into her head popped a bear. She said she meant no symbolism, no metaphor by it at all. It’s just, genuinely, that Lou takes a bear as her lover. So all the analysis and symbolism Engel left completely for the readers, which is another thing I like. There’s an awful lot you could take from it: humans connecting with the wild, women having the sex or relationships of their choice… it can be taken in all sorts of ways, or it can be read straight. I really believe that. In fact, my second novel, Swimming Lessons , is all about that. I created an ambiguous ending deliberately because books with ambiguous endings force the reader into deciding how to interpret them. I think it is absolutely up to the reader, and once a book is published it is created over and over by each reader because each of us will read it differently. In my mind I have a very clear image of the house Lou visits, but if you were to read Bear, no matter how well Engel describes the house, it would look different in your mind. So, I’ve created the book in my head, but in yours Bear would be a slightly different book. If we were to talk about it, you’d remember different things to me. So in that way, readers create books, and I love that."