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It isn't altogether a coincidence that I should have read two novels with animal narrators within a few months, because I like animal narrators. The fact that one (Three Bags Full) was by a Leonie Swann while this one, The Sage of Waterloo, is by a Leona Francombe, is complete coincidence, though at first I went googling to see if they might be the same person. They aren't.
I say narrators: in fact Three Bags Full has an outside narrative voice, though it doesn't see through human eyes. Its main protagonists are sheep and we see through their eyes throughout, but there is no actual first-person narration. In The Sage of Waterloo, we do have a first person narrator, the rabbit William, who lives at Hougoumont near the site of the Battle of Waterloo. He is one of a long line of Hougoumont rabbits, who are assumed to have a folk memory of the events that have taken place there. His grandmother Old Lavender, a sort of rabbit repository of folk wisdom, remarks "Landscapes where great passion has been spilled resonate. Not loudly. But loud enough for most wild creatures to detect. Once set in motion, the vibrations continue forever."
This is a plausible and interesting idea enough; wild animals can detect an oncoming earthquake, after all, and most battlefields have some resonance even for humans. But for me, the novel's narration does not work consistently, because William and his friends are not consistently rabbit-like. If an animal protagonist is not to turn into a furry human, it is essential for it to think and react in accord with its nature, which, for me, the sheep of Three Bags Full did all the time. William does sometimes sound like a rabbit – in his instinctive fear of open spaces, his way of "reading the air", his identification of the moon as some sort of divinity. But at other times he sounds too human, particularly when his author is using him to pass on historical information about Waterloo. For the purposes of the novel, I can go along with the notion that his grandmother, by listening intently to the conversation of visiting tourists, has picked up and passed on to him a lot of knowledge about the battle and its era. What I can't credit is that either she or he would be quite so interested in the history and nature of another species. Grandmother's condemnations of war: "Humans learn to do this to each other. Therefore one day they must unlearn it, before it's too late and all of them succumb to the same madness" just don't ring true. Nor do some of William's comparisons – "like a nun's cap"? I can credit that he might have seen a nun and even know what one was, but not that something so irrelevant to his own daily experience would occur to him as a comparison.
There are really two books here: William leading his rabbit life, which can be quite affecting, and an imaginative re-creation of Waterloo and its aftermath, which can also be interesting when it doesn't sound too much like a history lesson. But they don't really mesh.
I say narrators: in fact Three Bags Full has an outside narrative voice, though it doesn't see through human eyes. Its main protagonists are sheep and we see through their eyes throughout, but there is no actual first-person narration. In The Sage of Waterloo, we do have a first person narrator, the rabbit William, who lives at Hougoumont near the site of the Battle of Waterloo. He is one of a long line of Hougoumont rabbits, who are assumed to have a folk memory of the events that have taken place there. His grandmother Old Lavender, a sort of rabbit repository of folk wisdom, remarks "Landscapes where great passion has been spilled resonate. Not loudly. But loud enough for most wild creatures to detect. Once set in motion, the vibrations continue forever."
This is a plausible and interesting idea enough; wild animals can detect an oncoming earthquake, after all, and most battlefields have some resonance even for humans. But for me, the novel's narration does not work consistently, because William and his friends are not consistently rabbit-like. If an animal protagonist is not to turn into a furry human, it is essential for it to think and react in accord with its nature, which, for me, the sheep of Three Bags Full did all the time. William does sometimes sound like a rabbit – in his instinctive fear of open spaces, his way of "reading the air", his identification of the moon as some sort of divinity. But at other times he sounds too human, particularly when his author is using him to pass on historical information about Waterloo. For the purposes of the novel, I can go along with the notion that his grandmother, by listening intently to the conversation of visiting tourists, has picked up and passed on to him a lot of knowledge about the battle and its era. What I can't credit is that either she or he would be quite so interested in the history and nature of another species. Grandmother's condemnations of war: "Humans learn to do this to each other. Therefore one day they must unlearn it, before it's too late and all of them succumb to the same madness" just don't ring true. Nor do some of William's comparisons – "like a nun's cap"? I can credit that he might have seen a nun and even know what one was, but not that something so irrelevant to his own daily experience would occur to him as a comparison.
There are really two books here: William leading his rabbit life, which can be quite affecting, and an imaginative re-creation of Waterloo and its aftermath, which can also be interesting when it doesn't sound too much like a history lesson. But they don't really mesh.
