A sincere review of Marian Engel’s BEAR

What startled me most about Marian Engel’s Bear was not the bestiality. I knew about that going in. Like you, I am very online, and, like you, I saw that viral Tumblr post in which an anonymous user describes their astonishment upon stumbling across a romance novel about woman-bear sex that somehow won Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Literary Award in 1976.

No, what startled me about Bear when I finally read it was how good it is. With nothing to go on except its memetic afterlife, I expected intentionally goofy Chuck Tingle-style camp, or sloppy one-handed fetish smut, or hilariously ill-advised purple sentimentality. I did not expect a contemplative examination of modern woman’s ennui. I did not expect elegant sentence craft or understated yet evocative prose. I did not expect the book’s opening paragraph to greet me with the phrase “scurrying hastily through the tube of winter,” a metaphor which so deftly encompasses the way relentless Northern snow and darkness narrows our social lives, waking hours, and roadways. I did not expect a novel that perfectly encapsulates North American settlers’ quest for meaning in nature, and the narcissistic folly of that journey.

Bear tells the story of a mousy archivist named Lou who escapes the dreariness of urban life for the restorative haven of the Canadian wilderness. Her employer, the Heritage Institute, dispatches her to spend a summer on a remote wooded island poring over the estate of a 19^th century settler, Colonel John William Cary. Many generations of Colonel Carys lived there; the last, Colonel Jocelyn Cary, left the property to the Institute in her will. The enormous octagonal house, Pennarth (Welsh for “bear’s head”), comes with a trunk of antique clothing, a library of old books into which Colonel Cary scribbled ephemeral ursine trivia, and a semi-tame bear chained to a shed on the property. As weeks of solitude pass, Lou becomes the bear’s caretaker, friend, and lover.

In many ways, the novel follows the template of countless late-hippie stories from the 1960s and 70s: protagonist takes to the woods, communes with nature, finds herself, and returns to civilization changed. Lou has the obligatory affairs: with the Director of the Institute (her boss), an outdoorsman named Homer (married), and a bear (semi-tame). Lou even meets an Indigenous character who guides her toward enlightenment by imparting cryptic Earth wisdom upon her (in this instance, the elderly Cree animal wrangler urges Lou to befriend the bear by shitting with it in the morning). Where the novel differs, of course, is the shape of the protagonist’s relationship with nature. The more self-indulgent male authors gave the hero spiritual restoration in the arms of a thinly-drawn female love interest meant to represent freedom or purity or some other abstraction. In this novel, our heroine partners with an even more dehumanized object.

Settlers connect to nature through domination and exploitation. So, too, does Lou. For all her romantic notions, Lou is at best an obnoxious tourist in this natural splendor, at worse a colonizer. Pennarth sits not in wilderness but on it; for its existence, trees were leveled, digested by a sawmill, and shit out as the planks and beams that made those eight walls. Lou enters a forest already conquered for her, just as the first Colonel Cary built Pennarth on ground whose Indigenous inhabitants were already driven out by a centuries-long campaign of genocide. Lou lives in the settlers’ house, reads the settlers’ books, dines at the settlers’ table, even drags the settlers’ trunk out of the cellar to wear the settlers’ old clothes. Like too many feminists, Lou seeks personal liberation not by dismantling oppressive hierarchies, but by claiming her spot at the top as any patriarch would. Engel’s choice to call the heroine Lou hints at this masculinity, as well as the choice to make the last Colonel Cary a rather butch woman.

The bear onto which Lou projects her own psyche is no wild beast. It’s as tame as a bear can be. It lives in a shed at the end of a short chain with less enrichment than a caged animal at a decent zoo. It does not hunt or forage or fight or steal picnic baskets as free bears do; instead it eats kibble that Lou pours into a bowl, when she deigns to feed it. The bear is even housebroken. During its brief forays into Pennarth, it does not shit on the floor. And judging by the bear’s command of human anatomy, someone—perhaps that Cree woman—already taught it to perform cunnilingus.

Lou engages with the bear exclusively on her terms, not the bear’s. She lets it sleep by her hearth, but she does not join it for a night under the stars. She leads it on leashed walks. She coaxes it onto its hind legs to waltz with her, turning it into a literal dancing bear. Like Humbert Humbert forcing Dolores Haze into his Lolita, Lou makes the bear into an anthropomorphized fantasy lover rather than seeing the creature for what it really is.

The only time Lou attempts to couple with the bear on equal footing, it ends in disaster. Lou prostrates herself before the bear. With the swipe of its paw, the bear rejects her advances, scrawling a Dear John letter into her skin. No, Lou, you cannot marry a bear—you are a woman and the bear is a bear. No, Lou, you cannot really connect to the Canadian wilderness—you are a settler, an invasive species, raised on television and instant coffee.

The bear’s violent act of resistance wakes Lou from her dreams: she remembers that the bear is not an archetype, not a spirit, but a semi-tame bear. Soon after, she returns the bear to his caretaker and leaves Pennarth with the less-than-spiritual epiphany that she ought to quit her crummy job—a revelation most of us have in our twenties without fucking a bear.

How different, really, is Lou from any white-collar professional trying to cure modern alienation with a pricey New Age vacation? Is she really that much more deluded than a Silicon Valley techbro drinking algae-choked “raw water,” or an anti-vaxxer treating COVID with horse paste, or a Liver King follower gnawing on raw testicles, or Jordan Peterson putting himself into a beef coma, or the growing number of corporate drones who micro-dose psychedelics not to experience ego death but to increase productivity?

To some extent, we all do this. We alienated modern people try to heal ourselves by engaging with nature—but only on our terms via carefully curated transactional experiences. We buy little pieces of nature so we can own it, wear it, eat it, drink it, grind it up, smoke it, snort it, swallow it in pills, sweat it, and stuff it up our assholes to fill that spiritual void so we won’t have to feel bad anymore. Lou only went one step further by fucking it.

Bear is an astonishing retort to the Romantics, to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, to Jonathan Livingston Seagull, to any author who romanticized nature from a position of comfort and safety. Marian Engel’s novel seduces and skewers with subtlety that should not be possible in a novel about a woman having sex with a bear. And for that, it is Canada’s greatest contribution to English literature.

This piece was first published in TOWER VOL 1: END.