The Bear By Claire Cameron

Claire Bear Books
The Bear By Claire Cameron
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← The Bear – Claire Cameron. A Little Princess. Claire Cameron, this one is a NO for me. Kelley’s review of The Bear.This book was provided to our book club by publisher Little, Brown and Company as an advance readers copy in exchange for honest reviews.

The Bear will be released on February 11, 2014 by Little, Brown and Company. This book was received from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Claire Cameron’s second novel, THE BEAR, was long listed for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize), sold in ten territories, and is a number 1 bestseller in Canada. It won the Northern Lit Award from the Ontario Library Service, which her first novel, THE LINE PAINTER, also won.
The Bear, Claire Cameron's second novel, is narrated throughout by Anna. It's a bold authorial move: it takes time to get used to her voice, a stream of young, innocent consciousness, which.

So…I finished The Bear a few days ago, and I’m STILL not sure whether I liked it or not. Well, I did enjoy it, but I guess I’m wondering if I can classify it as A Great Book. I’m leaning toward yes, because I can’t really find many faults with it.

First of all, the first 40 pages or so show the bear attack. Everyone in our book club, including me, had a hard time with this section. Emails were flying around to the effect of “I can’t do this anymore, it’s too scary, I quit this book.” It was rough. It really wasn’t graphic at all, but just the thought of two young children being in that situation gives me the shivers, and it’s really difficult to hear it from the POV of a kid who really doesn’t understand what’s happening. I know that I personally kept imagining my littlest nephew and what he would do in that situation. But, if you can get past that section (my mother couldn’t, she stopped about 7 pages in), it does get really good and interesting and stops scaring the shit out of you. Mostly.

The interesting thing about The Bear is that not too much actually happened in the story, after the initial bear attack. BUT, I think that the story being pretty uneventful worked because of the child’s POV. If the book had been about an adult who’d fled the island after the attack, he’d be using his cell to call for help and then lying on the rocks getting a tan and listening to his Ipod, and that would be the end of the story. With a kid being the POV character, you get the heart-in-your-throat feeling every time she does anything at all: “Don’t eat the berries, you don’t EVER eat berries!!” “Where’s the little boy, what if he fell in the water and drowned???” Etc.

I do think that the child’s POV was well done. Of course, the downside to having a kid POV is that sometimes it’s very difficult to understand the setting and what’s happening because its described by a little girl who often goes off into tangents about Barbies. It made it difficult in some places to understand what was happening in some places. I think that’s also why this extremely short book took me 2 days to finish. I really had to analyze and reread some sections to figure out what the hell was going on.

Whatever it’s faults, though, this book definitely makes me want to discuss it really really badly (geez, book club is still almost a month away!!), so maybe that answers my original questions about whether it’s A Great Book. I’m going to wrap up this super long review with just a couple of thoughts I have that I can’t wait till book club to get out:

****SPOILERS BELOW****

I don’t understand exactly what happened during the bear attack that first night. Obviously the mother was attacked first, and her neck was broken. But she didn’t seem to be all that mangled (except possibly she was missing a leg). So…if not eating the mother, what was the bear doing while the father had time to run and get the kids and put them in the cooler? And after THAT, Anna heard her father talking, having a quiet conversation. And then…it was daylight. When exactly did the father get eaten and his leg ripped off, and why didn’t Anna hear him screaming? Did she just block it out (plausible since we find out later that she seems to have blocked out that she knew that the father was “in two pieces”)? Michelle has a really interesting theory about this, that the father was actually the bear, and was the one to kill the mother. I will let her explain that to you, but I will just say that I think it completely fits, EXCEPT that the father GOT HIS LEG RIPPED OFF and you just can’t get around that.

While sleeping in the “tent” she made, that first night alone, I don’t think she saw the bear. I think the growling she heard was her brother’s snoring, and the “bear” she saw was the tree stumps. This shows that she’s even more of an unreliable narrator than we already knew, considering that she’s a child.

By Pamelascott

The Bear by Claire Cameron

Harvill Secker (hardback), 2014

209 pages

This is a library book borrowed from The Mitchell Library (http://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/libraries/the-mitchell-library/Pages/home.aspx).

BLURB FROM THE COVER

Claire Bear Books

‘Mummy never yells. Mostly not ever. Except sometimes’.

Anna is five. Her little brother, Stick, is almost three. They are camping with their parents in Algonquin Park, in three thousand square miles of wilderness. It’s the perfect family trip. But then Anna awakes in the night to the sound of something moving in the shadows. Her father is terrified. Her mother is screaming. Then, silence.

Alone in the woods, it is Anna who has to look after Stick, battling hunger and the elements to stay alive. Narrated by Anna, this is white-knuckle storytelling that captures the fear, wonder and bewilderment of our worst nightmares – and the power of one girl’s enduring love for her family.

EXTRACT

I can hear the air going in and out of my brother’s nose. I am awake. He is two years old and almost three and he bugs me lots of times because I am five years old and soon I will be six but it is warm sleeping next to him. I call him Stick. He always falls asleep before me and I listen to the air of his nose. I can hear my parent’s voices. They are further away than I can reach and whispering because they think I can’t hear. I let out a squeak to let Momma know I am awake and she says ‘we’re right here’ from too far away. I squeak again and the tent zipper undoes and I can see the sky in the crack. Her cool hand brushes my hair back and her fingers touch my cheek. ‘Shh, Anna’, she says and the sky zips away again. When I am inside a tent the outside is far away.

REVIEW

I thought The Bear was incredibly sad and moving. Cameron offers the kind of novel that leaves a big lump in your throat. Every word of The Bear touched me deeply. The Bear is narrated by five-year-old Anna. This works really well. Anna doesn’t really understand what’s happening when the bear attacks. She thinks her Mum is mad when she yells. She thinks her father is angry because she did something bad and is so mad he’s staying away and doesn’t come when she yells for him. My heart was in my throat when Anna’s father bundles her and brother into the food cooler to hide them from the bear. My heart stayed in my throat for this whole section especially when the bear is trying to get into the place where Anna and her brother are hiding. Anna thinks the bear is a black dog and tries to touch it by sticking her arm out. She realises the animal is hostile and pulls her arm back in. Cameron does a great job at writing The Bear from the viewpoint of someone so young. Anna’s age and perspective add a whole layer of tension to The Bear that would be totally lost with an adult narrator. I thought the section of The Bear where Anna and her brother reach the woods after the canoe ride was a bit short. They don’t really need to battle the elements or hunger. Not for long anyway. I felt the hunter turns up a bit too soon and whisks Anna and her brother to hospital. I thought this section could have lasted a little bit longer. I thought it was a bit rushed. I enjoyed the epilogue when Anna and her brother return to the spot where their parents were killed twenty years later. Another lump in my throat moment. I didn’t realize until this point Anna’s mother had still been alive when they fled in the canoe and I actually cried.

RATING