Cass and the Beast

This has a very strange little plot that I will lay out in full, so excuse the spoilers. The townsfolk are afraid of a beast in the woods which they say could ‘munch you whole’, but Cass doesn’t believe them. She is only afraid of people. When she creeps out into the wood at night with a slice of bread, it takes her in its jaw, puts her on its back, and runs far away. At last it stops in a meadow where it scoops up hares ‘five at a time’ and crunches their bones (a moment that may upset some small children). Then she sleeps against the beast’s furry tummy. On her return the townsfolk see her kiss the beast and give her the new nickname her ‘Night Sneak’. She tells them the beast is not called beast but ‘Bear’.

There is a lot to enjoy here. There are echoes of Red Riding Hood venturing into the woods in Cass’ thin red coat. There is something of The Snowman in their supernatural voyage across the world – they seems to pass pyramids and volcanos. There is certainly something of The Tiger Who Came to Tea in Cass’ embrace of the ‘beast’ who might represent her feral, violent self. Claire Mabey can really write, and there is some gorgeous description. The beast has: ‘a damp scent like a cat after the rain’; houses are ‘crouched in the dark’. The pictures by Jill Calder are also absolutely gorgeous – I loved the depiction of the gossipy crowd of townsfolk, that makes you feel why Cass wants to escape; the strange twilight shades of the colour palette; the way the beast’s entirety is only hinted at until the end through partial glimpses.

But the ending was totally baffling to me. Why would Cass ‘quite like’ being called ‘Night Sneak’? What are her adults doing in all this? More importantly, the revelation that the beast is actually a bear doesn’t work at all. Bears are incredibly dangerous, and the idea that a child should try and hand-feed one in the woods and that it might cuddle her is absolute madness. I’m surely not the only grownup who has seen Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man, where the impulse to anthropomorphise bears led to Timothy Treadwell’s horrific death. As Werner Herzog noted: ‘What haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature’.

This is being pitched as a book about ‘bravery’ but ‘choosing not to be afraid’ of a bear is not a useful lesson. The book only really works when the ‘beast’ is an uncanny nightmare – ‘fathomless as a pond at night’. A metaphorical beast rather than a real flesh-and-blood creature.