2016 mimetic fiction. Alan Reece qualifies as a vet, and finds that
actual practice barely overlaps with what they taught him at the
Langford Veterinary School.
Disclaimer: Nick is a friend; we game together and co-host a film
podcast. I did not pay for this book. He knows I'm going to give it an
honest review.
And it's very good, but it's sometimes tough going; there's emotional
rawness here which feels drawn from the life, the sort of
bottom-dropping-out-of-the-world moment that few people talk about but
which I suspect is universally recognisable. I read the first half one
chapter at a time between doing other things; it was too much taken
all at once.
Most of the chapters are quite short and describe single incidents;
there are occasional references to earlier or later events, but mostly
they're complete in themselves (with a stylistic trick, which gets
slightly irritating once one notices it, of foreshadowing the tone of
what's going to happen in the next). As one might expect from this,
it's much more slice of life than a single coherent story, and the
ending is rather sudden and unheralded.
There are diversions into technical detail which I very much enjoyed
(some perhaps not for the weak of stomach), but what I really took
away from this is a philosophy of animal ownership, or rather a lack
of one: why do you have a dog or cat or snake or whatever in the first
place? If the answer is "because it's a thing people like me do"…
well, maybe that's not really good enough. At the very least, you
shouldn't assume other people share it; one of the most powerful
scenes is with the cat owner who "just wants it put to sleep" while
the vet tries to explain how there isn't even anything terribly wrong
with him. (Of course, since this is a commercial enterprise, the
customer is always right… as far as they know.)
But then realising that other people exist as separate entities is
really quite a late stage of childhood development…
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.