K-SCORE: 67
Author: Claire Cameron
Spoiler Level: Major
Claire Cameron’s The Bear is an interesting novel with a unique style. I wouldn’t like to read anything else with the same narrative structure, but as an isolated and short book it was pretty good - highly experimental.
Cameron tells the story of a bear attack on a family of four through the eyes of a five-year-old, Anna, as she takes care of her brother Alex following the horrific event where her parents get mauled and eaten. The narrative voice of Anna is simultaneously the novel’s greatest strength and provides the most storytelling obstacles, only a some of which are actually hurdled. Most of the time Cameron does a great job with the unclear and wandering mind of such a young narrator and Anna’s sense of morality and logic provides the bulk of the entertainment, though at times I found inconsistencies in the depth of her understanding. For example: how can Anna successfully identify a moose and a beaver, yet think the bear that ate her parents is a black dog?
It’s a short novel, but at the same time too long. Some of Anna’s half-memories drag on and distract from the conflict in the wilderness without adding significant depth. The final section after the kids rescue is especially bloated. The triumphant climax of of the book is when Anna carries her brother on her back past her teddy bear, which, though wonderful character development, happens too many pages before you flip to the back cover. The epilogue is especially unsatisfying given that it doesn’t feel like these twenty-something people are at all the Anna and Sticky you got to know.
(Maybe that’s an impossible task though. Are we really at all the same people we were as tiny little children? Here's a picture me (so my parents claim) when I was Sticky’s age. I… I just don’t see it kid.)
Somehow though Claire Cameron finds value in telling a tragic story through the bizarrely beautiful mind of a very young girl. There’s something potent about a struggling voice, and as experiments in literature go, this is very far from the least successful.
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Seriously, who is that little boy? Blonde hair, tiny eyes that are really close together, wide nose, big forehead. That guy grew up to become some bank manager, who talks about baseball only in the most general sense, who has a chubby wife named Betsy, and whose biggest problems have to do mortgages.