'Why, why, why, why, why, why?' the tiger asks itself hour after hour, day after day, year after year, as it treads its endless path behind the bars of its cage." Consider, for example, Ishmael's reflection on a zoo: "The tiger you see madly pacing its cage is nevertheless preoccupied with something that a human would certainly recognize as a thought. WHAT makes the book is the way it links insight with imagery. Instead, we need to remember a time when we lived without our garden, as the Kalahari Bushmen and their predecessors lived for three million years - a time when we understood, however unconsciously, that we belonged to the world, before we got the notion that the world belongs to us. We must turn from our favorite Creation stories, in which Creation ends with a pair of human beings in a garden. To survive, we will have to reinvent ourselves. But we won't be able to flout them forever. Since the neolithic age, however, most of us have managed to ignore these rules temporarily. One of the most important things we have forgotten, Ishmael argues, is the fact that we are rooted in the natural world just as firmly as any other animal, and that the rules of that world apply to us too.
When he notices Ishmael's ad for a pupil who wants to save the world, he answers it, and a brilliantly envisioned Socratic dialogue begins. The narrator, in turn, has frequently been troubled by a distressing suspicion that he has been lied to about our condition, which is not, he suspects, what we claim.
Ishmael has perceived important similarities between his enforced captivity and our modern way of living, which has isolated us from the realities of existence for so long that we have forgotten who we are and how we got here. Ishmael was captured as an infant and sold, first to a zoo and later to a menagerie from which he was rescued by a wealthy Jewish benefactor who freed him and provided for him in his will. The Ishmael of the title is a gorilla, so deftly drawn that one not only suspends one's disbelief but becomes fascinated by him. ‘Red Comet’: Heather Clark’s new biography of the poet Sylvia Plath is daring, meticulously researched and unexpectedly riveting.‘Intimacies’: Katie Kitamura’s novel follows an interpreter at The Hague who is dealing with loss, an uncertain relationship and an insecure world.