The Bestiary - Hardcover

Christopher, Nicholas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385337361 ISBN 13: 9780385337366

Publisher: The Dial Press, 2007

Synopsis

From “a writer of remarkable gifts,” “Borges with emotional weight, comes a tale that is at once a fantastical historical mystery, a haunting love story, and a glimpse into the uncanny—the quest for a long-lost book detailing the animals left off Noah’s Ark.

Xeno Atlas grows up in the Bronx, his Sicilian grandmother’s strange stories of animal spirits his only escape from the legacy of his mother’s early death and his stern father’s long absences as a common seaman. Shunted off to an isolated boarding school, with his father’s activities abroad and the source of his newfound wealth grown increasingly mysterious, Xeno turns his early fascination with animals into a personal obsession: his search for the Caravan Bestiary. This medieval text, lost for eight hundred years, supposedly details the animals not granted passage on the Ark—griffins, hippogriffs, manticores, and basilisks—the vanished remnants of a lost world sometimes glimpsed in the shadowy recesses of our own.

Xeno’s quest takes him from the tenements of New York to the jungles of Vietnam to the ancient libraries of Europe—but it is only by riddling out his own family secrets that he can hope to find what he is looking for. A story of panoramic scope and intellectual suspense, The Bestiary is ultimately a tale of heartbreak and redemption.

About this title

About the Author

Nicholas Christopher is the author of four previous novels, The Soloist, Veronica, A Trip to the Stars, and Franklin Flyer, eight books of poetry, and a book about film noir, Somewhere in the Night. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

Reviewed by Ron Charles

Long before we became experts at driving animals to extinction, we were desperate to record their existence. Naming the animals was the only work Adam did in Paradise, which suggests something about the fundamental pleasure we still get from identifying creatures. The most ancient paintings in the world show bison and mammoths cavorting. Herodotus, Aristotle and Pliny the Elder produced wide-ranging works of natural history. By the 12th century, Europe was gaga over bestiaries: lavishly illustrated books that described all the known animals, along with mystical creatures, such as the sphinx, the griffin and the chimera. Medieval authors assigned various moral and allegorical significance to each animal as a way of "reading" the natural world that God created. There's something oddly compelling about these ancient portraits -- their strange mingling of wisdom and whimsy.

And now, like the phoenix rising from its ashes, the idea of searching for meaning in lost animals has been reborn in Nicholas Christopher's magical and melancholy novel The Bestiary. The story begins with the childhood of Xeno Atlas in New York in the 1950s. His mother died when he was born, and his father, who never recovered from that loss, travels around the world for months at a time on freighters. "Loneliness was at the center of my childhood," Xeno tells us. "From it proceeded all I was to become." Left to the care of his maternal grandmother, who "had strong connections to the animal spirits," Xeno is raised on fantastical stories. "I heard about the one-winged stork that flew over the Alps and laid an egg from which an entire city was born; and the serpent that ate the moon and spat out a skyful of stars; and the black bear that fell asleep on a mountaintop and awoke a hundred years later in the same spot, now a tiny island in the sea, and turned himself into a whale."

In his dreary household these stories provide an element of necessary magic, and it's no surprise when, for a moment, the boundary between reality and fantasy seems to fray: "Late one night," Xeno writes, "after she finished one of her stories, the stray headlight of a passing car shone through the window and I was stunned to see, not my grandmother, but a red fox, with a ring of white fur around its neck, stretched out on her bed." Christopher is doing something strange here -- and tantalizing. Another time, Xeno wakes up and sees something perched on his windowsill: "Its wings, tail, and spiky crest were silhouetted against a yellow moon. I was frightened but also thrilled when I realized it was one of the two griffins that graced the parapet of the First National Bank." His story remains entirely realistic, and there's no reason to think these unnatural sightings are anything but the waking dreams of a little boy raised on a rich diet of animal legends, and yet . . . and yet subsequent events suggest, ever so subtly, that his brief visions are in fact insights to some deeper reality, a world of mythological meaning and connection that attracts Xeno for the rest of his life.

Sent to a prison-like boarding school in Maine, the boy takes refuge in his history classes, where he first learns of the medieval bestiaries. Pressed to explain his interest, he can only reply, "I just can't get it out of my head." And so begins a lifelong search for the most fabulous bestiary of all, "The Caravan Bestiary," invented by Christopher and brilliantly woven into the history of several actual manuscripts. This lost document is rumored to include all the animals denied entry on Noah's Ark. "It was one of those rare instances," Xeno tells us, "in which a youthful enthusiasm that could have evaporated instead grew more powerful each year."

Clearly, this quest is motivated by a parallel search for his parents, the mother he never knew and the father he never understood. But what follows is a richly drawn search across Europe, guided by rare manuscripts, stray references in crumbling letters and clues fed to him by sympathetic librarians and collectors. Xeno walks "a road bound on the one side by history and on the other by a luminous shifting terrain defined by faith as well as facts." The provenance of "The Caravan Bestiary" provides a dizzying tour of medieval lore and amateur archaeology, wending through 700 tortuous years of intrigue, including Lord Byron, the Black Death, a séance and corrupt Roman Catholic officials. (Is it possible to read anything nowadays without catching a whiff of The Da Vinci Code?)

As Xeno's search for "The Caravan" draws him into the past, the novel moves through the major events of the mid-20th century, with a powerful section on the Vietnam War and the drug-addled disillusionment that followed. A clever subplot involving a biologist trying to save endangered animals from extinction draws these ancient and modern themes together.

Christopher includes a few dozen animals in the glossary, but his publisher should have sprinkled these fanciful beasts throughout the novel in color. Take a look at an American edition of Gould's Book of Fish (2002) by Richard Flanagan. Grove/Atlantic spent a fortune printing the text in different colors -- to reflect the narrator's handmade inks -- along with illustrations of his fish at the beginning of each chapter. It's a gorgeous, tasteful example of the way art can enhance a novel, and The Bestiary would have benefited from the same kind of attention.

In any case, if Christopher weren't such a careful writer, he could easily succumb to his aphoristic bent (and probably make a lot more money). His mournful narrator slips now and then into the Profound Mode: "Our illusions can ravage us as mercilessly as violence or disease. And the illusions of others, when they take on lives of their own, are even more dangerous." Back in my Jonathan Livingston Seagull days, I would have wanted that on a poster for my dorm room. The key to this strange novel's allure may be its tantalizing blend of tones: melancholic one moment and a little ridiculous the next. "In a world of infinite metamorphoses," Xeno asks, "who can cleanly separate the fantastical from the commonplace? Who would want to?" Christopher captures that adolescent thrill of falling into the mythological world and finding our deepest fears and desires embodied -- alive, frightening and fantastic.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Bestiary, Nicholas Christopher's fifth novel-after Franklin Flyer (2002) and A Trip to the Stars (2000)-has more than a little in common with Dan Brown's hugely popular The Da Vinci Code: the plots of both books are driven by a search for a lost object whose disappearance involves significant religious and historical intrigue. But The Bestiary is no mere Da Vinci knockoff. As the Washington Post opines, by blurring the edges of fantasy and reality, "Christopher is doing something strange here-and tantalizing." The novel's exploration of magical realism is what sets it apart, and its depiction of Xeno's enchanting, melancholy journey from Paris to Venice to Vietnam as he discovers beasts and himself is both riveting and heartwarming.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

In Christopher's magical fifth novel, a sympathetic history teacher takes an interest in quiet, studious Xeno Atlas, who has developed a burning interest in real and imaginary animals. I first heard of the Caravan Bestiary when I was fifteen years old, and it changed the course of my life, Xeno declares. The young man undertakes a quest to find the ancient manuscript, which describes animals left off Noah's Ark (including the Catoblepas, a white bird with divining powers) and was assumed lost many years ago. The search entails an around-the-world journey, wherein Xeno learns the answers to long-standing family mysteries, uncovers a wealth of lost knowledge and finds true love with his best friend's sister, the lovely Lena Moretti. Christopher (A Trip to the Stars) also saddles his protagonist with a dead mother; a mysterious, perpetually grieving, peripatetic father; a shape-shifting shamanistic grandmother; and a lonely, troubled childhood. His evocative prose yields a narrative loaded with fascinating arcana and intriguing characters. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Influenced by his grandmother's fanciful bedtime stories, punctuated by realistic animal sounds, Xeno Atlas is fascinated by animal lore and mythological beasts. A lonely boy stuck in a dysfunctional-mold-breaking family a dead mother, an estranged uncle, a shape-shifting grandmother, and an uncommunicative, absentee father Xeno eschews childhood pastimes, pursuing instead scholarly clues to an ancient Caravan Bestiary: an illuminated record of animals denied passage on Noah's Ark. Over time, Xeno increasingly identifies with these misunderstood, extinct, and imaginary animals (even creating some of his own), preferring dragons and hippogryphs to beastly humans. His adult travels take him full circle to his Cretan ancestral roots and to unexpected answers, finally tying up the story's vexatious loose ends. Despite the author's signature use of magic realism, tantalizing references to a rich spiritual plane, a wounded hero, and a lost manuscript, the novel's potential falls somewhat flat under the weight of its leisurely pace and overabundant detail, lacking the emotive power of Byatt's Possession or the atmospheric tension of Zafon's Shadow of the Wind. Still, readers of those and similar works will find some satisfaction here. Baker, Jennifer

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One


The first beast I laid eyes on was my father.

At all hours his roars reverberated, breaking into my sleep, rattling the windows. When he entered my doorway, he filled it. That was my earliest impression: he was bigger than the door. And he came from far away, smelling of the sea, snow fringing his thick coat and woolen cap.

We lived in four dark rooms. I shared a room with an old woman, my mother’s mother. My father slept in the room across the hall, tossing on the rusty box springs, snoring loudly. He was a restless sleeper, getting up many times in the night, his footfall heavy on the creaking boards. Then there was the kitchen, a low-ceilinged room with a black stove and a round table where my grandmother fed me.

When shadows moved through those rooms, brushing my skin like mist, I could hear their subtlest workings. Sound was my primary sense. The world seemed to be coming to me through my ears. Water trickling through wall pipes, steam knocking in the radiator, a mouse scratching, a fly buzzing. In sleep my grandmother’s breathing was punctuated by a whistle from the gap in her teeth. Everything else out of her mouth was a whisper. She whispered to me continuously, as she must once have whispered to my mother.

I believe my grandmother was telling me things, and when I came to understand words, they were already embedded in my consciousness. Dates, names, places that could not have arrived there by any other route. My grandmother’s history, my mother’s—the story of their lives, which I had just entered, a character in my own right.

My mother died in childbirth.

That was when my father began to roar. In my first year, this was how I knew him. Then one day he fell silent, as if he had dived into a deep pool inside himself from which, in my presence at least, he never truly emerged.

There was a dog and a cat. The first nonhuman beasts I would know. The dog was my grandmother’s. He was a German shepherd, black with a tan muzzle, named Re. He slept at the entrance to my room, like a sentry.

The cat had no name. She was orange, with white stripes and golden eyes. When she came to the windowsill from the fire escape, my grandmother fed her kitchen scraps. Sometimes the cat curled up beside me and slept. I remember her warmth, her small breath on my arm, the ticking of her tail against my ribs.

At night my grandmother held and rocked me, stroking my head or singing a lullaby. Her own bed felt far away in the darkness, like a ship across a deep harbor. Mostly I was alone, the window to my left, the door before me, the ceiling overhead lined with plaster cracks—a map of some nonexistent place I studied.

A part of us never leaves the first room we occupy. Everything I was to hear, see, or feel first took shape in that room. It was a world—with landmarks, climate, a population—splintered infinitesimally off the bigger world. The air was dark blue. It moved. Was ruled by currents. Ripples. Fevers of motions.

I felt the spirits of animals. In the instants of entering or leaving sleep I caught glimpses of them: an upturned snout, a lizard eye, a glinting talon, the flash of a wing. Hooves kicked up sparks by my cheek. Fur bristled. Teeth clicked. I heard pants. Howls. Plaintive cries.

And at dawn they were gone.

The first imaginary animal I ever saw leapt out at me from my father’s back. He was shirtless, shaving in a cloud of steam with the bathroom door open, when I came up behind him. Inked in blues and reds—with flashes of yellow—the tattoo looked alive, undulating with every movement of my father’s muscles, from his shoulders to his waist.

It was a sea serpent. A long scaly body with a horse’s head. Flaming mane, fiery tail fin, bared fangs, glowing eyes. A terrifying hybrid. It was surfacing through cresting waves, beneath clouds torn by lightning, with foam streaming off its back.

I cried out, and my father wheeled around, shaving cream on his chin and his razor frozen in midair. Kneeling down, he patted my cheek and reassured me that there was nothing to fear. I didn’t agree. To this day, it is the most fearsome tattoo I’ve ever seen.

“It scares away evil spirits when I’m at sea,” he said.

To me, it was an evil spirit.

My father was the man who shoveled coal into the furnace on a freighter. His name was Theodore. His hands were huge, his arms and shoulders knotted like wood. His back so solid it had once bent a knife blade when he was jumped in an alley. He had black eyes, curly black hair, and a thick, close-cropped beard. His eyebrows met above his hooked nose. He wore a heavy medallion on a chain around his neck. When I first saw images of pirates in a picture book, I thought this was what he must be.

Usually he was away for two months at a time. When he came home, even after he had bathed every day for a week, the coal dust still adhered to his hair, his skin, his breath. He would be talking and a black wisp would trail the end of a sentence.

Ports he visited in one year alone: Hamburg, Marseilles, Singapore, Murmansk, Caracas, Montevideo, Sydney. He sailed through the Panama and Suez canals, around Cape Horn and through the Strait of Magellan. He followed the equator across the Indian Ocean from the Seychelles to the Maldives.

Sometimes he sent a postcard from a foreign port. Only one of these has survived, yellowed and crumpled: a tinted photograph of the open-air fish market in the harbor at Tangier. Rows of sardines gleaming silver on rickety carts. The sun casting webbed shadows through the nets hung to dry. A man in a kaftan beating the ink from squid on the seawall. As a boy, I could almost smell the harbor. From the stamp on the other side a man in a red fez gazed out severely. My father’s laborious print, in watery ink, turned pale brown over the years. He was a man of few words, written or otherwise.

Arrived Friday, leave Tuesday for Alexandria. Raining. —Theodore Atlas

His name signed in full. The card addressed to “Atlas,” and then our street address.

His parents, married as teenagers, had emigrated from Crete. Their village was perched in the mountains of the interior, amid jagged cliffs, deep ravines, and pine forests. Its inhabitants were like the man Odysseus was told to watch for when he traveled to remote lands carrying an oar—a man who, never having set eyes on the sea, would ask him if the oar was a winnowing fan. These Cretans were farmers and goatherds who never ventured more than ten miles from the houses in which they had been born and would die. My grand- parents were an exception.

They settled in the Bronx and died before my father turned sixteen, his mother of diphtheria, his father in an accident on the docks. Like me, my father was an only child, and he had no other relatives in America. Having to support himself suddenly, he dropped out of school. Already over six feet, he could pass for eighteen. He might have become a stevedore, like his father, but instead went to sea, signing on to a freighter flying the Colombian flag, bound for Lisbon.

He had only seen the Atlantic from Jones Beach and Far Rockaway. Just as his ancestors had lived within a tight radius of their village, he had rarely left the South Bronx and only once—a week in the Catskills—been out of New York City. The open sea stunned him. His father had told him that only the sky above the mountains in Crete was bluer, so close to the mountaintops you could reach it by scaling the tallest tree. My father claimed to have done just that on his first visit to his parents’ village, several years after I was born—the most expansive statement I ever heard him make.

Still, however, nothing he ever said or did in those days compared in scope to his tattoo. I never really got used to it. And I never forgot that it was there, so at odds with the drab inexpensive clothing that covered it.

When I asked my father about it one day, he told me he had been tattooed in Osaka, Japan. He said he was twenty-five years old at the time. Which meant my mother had lived with it. I wondered what she thought when she saw it for the first time—if it frightened her, too—and how she felt sleeping beside it at night. Even among Japanese sailors this particular tattoo was uncommon. The image was so ferocious that many regarded it as a challenge to the sea gods, which could as easily provoke as appease them.

I encountered the tattoo twice more in my life. The first time was on the docks in Tokyo, where I was boarding a ferry. Three young Japanese sailors, shirtless in the afternoon sun, were awaiting a dinghy that would return them to their ship. One of them turned into the wind to light a cigarette, and there was the sea serpent on his back, vividly colored. I stopped and stared, moving on only when the sailors stared back.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Dial Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385337361
• ISBN 13: 9780385337366
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320