Land Mammals and Sea Creatures / Jen Neale

Land Mammals and Sea Creatures by Jen Neale
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Humans are strange animals. For one thing, we like to deny that we are animals, that we are connected to the natural world, or that death is a normal and necessary part of life. I saw a cartoon once of various animals thinking, *Eat, survive, reproduce.* They were clear on their purpose. The next panel was a person wondering, *What's it all about?* We make life so complicated for ourselves. Jen Neale explores these complications, denials, and inevitabilities in this novel.

In the first chapter, we witness the beaching of a blue whale, self-destruction in action. Every year, whales head for land and strand themselves, dying a horrible death, but no one yet has deduced why this behaviour exists. Surely the self-destructive genes should be weeded out of the population by now? This foreshadows much of the action ahead in the book. Marty, Ian, Julie, Nancy, they are all dancing around the self-destructive impulse. Neale mirrors that in the natural world, with the decaying whale carcase, a lost dog, a road killed racoon. Is it as normal as the impulse to live?

It made me think about depression, PTSD, suicide, and how one responds to those things. In a society where we can order anything on the internet except happiness, where war, hunger, and disease are everyday life for many people, where we are busily damaging our environment to satisfy economic goals.

Julie is to Marty as Marty was to his dog, Midge. Like Julie with the little racoon, Bert. Hanging on, unwilling to let go. Desperately wanting the other creature to want the same thing that they do. Part of life is learning that it doesn't work that way, but it's a difficult lesson and not everyone absorbs it. Is Jennie/JLL/Victoria representing how the arts can help us when life gets ugly? Not necessarily to make things better, but to make the path clear? To assist in processing emotions that we've denied, pushed down, avoided? How easy it is to seek comfort, how burdensome it is to face realities.

Marty has made a small B.C. town into his own personal hell. The miasma of decaying whale permeates the community, telling us exactly how much his life stinks. As Milton wrote, *The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.* We each need to decide where it is we live, not necessarily the physical location, but the psychological one. Every living thing dies eventually, individual or species. It's awful, it's necessary, and it also has its own beauty.


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