She journeys upriver to the house, along “this silent, creeping shore”. When Lou arrives in this landscape “hectic with new green”, she has a lurching realisation about the paucity of her life, feeling “as old as the yellowed papers she spent her days unfolding”. Cary’s Island is no longer a romantic outpost for colonial adventuring, but a tourist destination – and the estate remains intact, complete with a resident bear. The colonel’s English ancestor had served in the Napoleonic wars, and nursed fantasies of living on an island.
New horizons beckon, however the institute has been granted the estate of Colonel Jocelyn Cary: an island, with a house containing a large library. Her life has become narrow and joyless, punctuated by perfunctory sex with the institute’s director. Lou is an archivist in a dusty Canadian Historical Institute. He is no cuddly toy, but she becomes surprisingly intimate with him. When Lou, the narrator of Marian Engel’s 1976 novel, Bear, meets a real bear, she finds that “its nose was more pointed than she expected – years of corruption by teddy bears, she supposed”.
“A surrealist story which draws you in slowly, with the fantasy of a Guillermo del Toro film and the grinning darkness of an Ottessa Moshfegh novel.W hat do you think of when you think of a bear? A large, lumbering creature, unpredictably violent? Perhaps you think of Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog’s jaw-dropping film about a man killed by one of the creatures he so adored? Do you think of the bearded, heavy-set man contrasted, in the informal typology among gay men, with the skinnier, more feminine twink? Or perhaps you think of a cuddly toy? shapely as a folktale, and with the same disturbing resonance.” -Margaret Atwood
Bear has retained its power to shock and unsettle, but also to move readers with its unexpected tale of a young woman’s journey to a deeper understanding of herself. When she is summoned to a remote Canadian island to inventory the estate of the recently deceased Colonel Cary, she discovers the colonel had left a secret amongst his possessions: a bear.Īlone on the island, Lou sinks her fingers into the massive bear’s fur and is overcome by an obsessive passion-one that breaks an ancient taboo and one that could very well be deadly.įirst published in 1976, Marian Engel’s Bear won the Canadian Governor General’s Award and quickly became one of the country’s most famous and controversial novels. Lou is a shy and secretive twenty-seven-year-old librarian living a lonely life in her dusty basement office. “A quietly sensual, feminist story.”- The New Yorker
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