Engaging and thought-provoking, Animals Strike Curious Poses is a collection of essays that will engage anyone with an interest in the animal kingdom and the way in which human beings interact both with and in it. Taking the form of a bestiary — a medieval book devoting its chapters to descriptions of exotic fauna for the benefit of readers living with the absence of National Geographic and Animal Planet — Passarello’s collection focuses on individual members of a wide range of species. Her approach pays off as the book isn’t so much a catalogue of species’ quirks — though there is some of that — as much as a meditation on what we as human beings seem to find so compelling about our animal brethren.

The essays are arranged chronologically, with the first reaching back 39,000 years to consider Yuka, a woolly mammoth discovered in Russia’s Arctic north in 2010. Reportedly the best-preserved specimen ever discovered, with a significant amount of hair still intact, Yuka has been on display in museums since 2012. Passarello’s essay is speculative, concerned with Yuka’s final hours, with what brought her to the cave where she would be discovered, and with the wounds and incisions in her flesh that were made not by teeth and claws, but by sharpened stone tools — and the hands that held them steady.

This is Passarello’s intention: to explore the intersection between the human and the non-human, to see how one has affected the other, served the other and — all too often — destroyed the other. At their best, the essays can be simultaneously whimsical and enlightening, as when she writes about the European starling named Vogel Staar, who was companion to none other than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and whose erratic song structures may have had an influence on the composer’s own work.

From ancient, deep-frozen woolly mammoths to spiders aboard space stations, what animals can teach humans is astounding

Or consider Arabella, a spider who joined the astronauts on Skylab III in the 1970s and who spun erratic, but recognisable, spider webs in zero gravity — an act that should have been impossible given that it is gravity itself that defines both the shape of the web and the way the spider uses its own body to create the structure. Passarello cleverly equates Arabella, floating through the air on a line of her own webbing, with the astronauts who space-walk in hard vacuum with only a thin line tethering them to the space station, drawing a connection between the arachnid’s disorientation in this alien, zero gravity environment, and the astronauts’.

This connection is made explicit in her quartet of mini-essays about horses (that includes ruminations on the star of the 1960s sitcom Mr Ed, as well as the horse that threw and crippled Superman actor Christopher Reeve). Discussing Clever Hans, a horse who gained fame in 1904 for being able to solve maths problems on par with a nine-year-old child, Passerello muses that “In the very distant past … human and horse brains matched. We don’t know exactly when this was … but once upon a time, we were identical: small, ratlike and vertebrate, with sharp mouths and sensitive eyes.” So what happened next? She provides a concise, two-sentence summary of the next 30-odd million years: “And then an asteroid hit, almost everybody died, the lush green became mottled with fruits and flowers, and as we ate them, our bodies changed. We slunk out from the underbrush and became many creatures, each one lost in its own thoughts.”

Not every essay is a winner, though. Some of them are too clever by half, such as ‘Jeoffrey’, that attempts to write about a cat in verse (completing a poem from 1760 that has been partially lost), and just ends up being cloying. ‘Harriet’ takes as its fascinating subject a Galapagos tortoise brought to England on Charles Darwin’s ship The Beagle, and belittles it through too-cute use of the second person. ‘Koko’ focuses on a gorilla who was taught sign language by researchers in the 1980s and eventually learned how to combine signs to create entirely new words and phrases, but any reader who doesn’t already know her story will be baffled: the essay attempts an unfortunate mimicry of the ape’s speech by limiting itself to the thousand-odd words that she ultimately learned, in order to express a worldview that is ostensibly hers. It works about as well as you would expect.

Much more often, though, Passarello’s stylistic risks pay off, as in her consideration of the various elephants who made their way to the United States in the late 1800s, just as Thomas Edison was experimenting with large-scale electric lighting. Somehow, the author manages to tie together capital punishment, celebrity culture, urban expansion and the industrial revolution into a single coherent essay. I’m still not sure how she pulls it off, but it’s an impressive trick.

Ultimately, this collection contains a lot more that works than that which doesn’t. Readers looking to expand their understanding of the natural world, or at least their ideas about how human beings have engaged with it, will find much to enjoy here.

The reviewer is the author of five novels, including The Preservationist and Fallen

Animals Strike
Curious Poses
By Elena Passarello
Sarabande, US
ISBN: 978-1941411391
200pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 23rd, 2017