Planet of the ants
The best Canadian novel about insects is back in print – huzzah!
I was flabbergasted to learn Bakka Books was re-issuing Consider Her Ways (1947), the long out-of-print novel by the late Frederick Philip Grove. Here’s why.
"Life-altering" books come in all forms: On The Road, the Bible, Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that one Oprah really likes, etc. At the invitation of ridicule (well deserved, I fear), I’ll add Consider Her Ways, the best Canadian novel about ants. Ever.
Grove is a CanLit standard (Settlers of the Marsh, Master of the Mill, and others), but not for this book. My own introduction to Consider Her Ways came via an undergrad survey course, in which the professor made an offhand mention of Grove’s final work, "a really weird book about ants." I ran to the library.
Named after Proverbs 6:6, Consider Her Ways (1947) takes the time-honoured sci-fi form of a found manuscript. In his Introduction, the thinly pseudonymous "Fred Philgrove" writes of his time in Venezuela. Philgrove spent hours observing the Atta gigantea species of giant jungle ant, one of whom (the snobbish Wawa-quee) regaled him with psychic transmissions. Wawa-quee spun a tale filled with danger and excitement, and Philgrove took it upon himself to transcribe her story for human consumption. And so was born Consider Her Ways, a book by and about ants, but for the people.
More than just Animal Farm-style sci-fi satire, Consider Her Ways is a bizarre mix of hard science, cutesy anthropomorphization, scatological musings, ripping adventure yarn, travelogue (the ants take Manhattan!), gory battle scenes, and some of the funniest, most baroque, sentences ever set down. (One favourite, of many: "I could not overlook the distinct outward swing which she knew how to impart to the movement of her antennae: it was an unmistakably ironic curve.") And did I mention the latent lesbian ant-passion?
The novel is so weird, so good, that it became a linchpin for a personal canon of misguided Boy Scout enthusiasms: plastic ant farms, The Food Insect Newsletter, Robyn Hitchcock lyrics, the Museum of Jurassic Technology in L.A., the list goes on. Despite its 50-year-plus vintage, Consider Her Ways is still a fresh read, and – if you were lucky enough to unearth a dusty old copy – would fit rather nicely on a nightstand alongside, say, McSweeney’s.
Like I say, I can’t believe it’s back in print.
"What’s been surprising is that we’ve had a lot of reactions like yours," says Salman Nensi, publisher of Bakka Books. Along with editorial director John Rose (who also owns the Toronto sci-fi bookstore from which the small-press imprint takes its name), Nensi has embarked on a mission to rescue out-of-print Canadian sci-fi classics.
"Quite a number of people – including other publishers – have sent us notes saying, ‘I’m so pleased you re-issued Consider Her Ways, it was one of my favourite books growing up.’ And it’s coming from places we’d never expected it to, people we wouldn’t have thought would read speculative fiction."
More visually inviting than my yellowed New Canadian Library edition (with its dour coffee-ring stain cover art), the handsome new Consider Her Ways trade paperback follows last fall’s re-publication of James deMille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) and Phyllis Gotlieb’s Sunburst (1964). Next in the Bakka collection is the Spring 2002 re-issue of Calgary author Dave Duncan’s West of January.
Nensi summarizes their selection criteria as "books that are cool and neat" – and things don’t get much cooler, or neater, than a novel in which a disapproving ant solemnly reports, "I have seen a peculiarly disreputable-looking human lie down under a cow and apply his mouth to a teat of her udder...."
On second thought, maybe that’s just plain weird. At any rate: gentlemen of Bakka Books, the ants salute you. |
