The Entire Animal

Gregory HeathPublication: July 26th, 2006

£6.99

‘You’re a very talented man, highly respected in your field. You’re incredibly passionate about what you do – about nature, animals … You’re reasonably good-looking … and you work hard.’

Michael perceives a definite air of finality about his sister-in-law’s last comment. ‘Is that it?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s all the good points?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the bad points?’ he says, wincing.
‘You drink too much.’
‘Ah.’
‘And you’re too wrapped up in your work. You’ve isolated yourself from the rest of the human race. You do what you do and it’s your whole life and there’s nothing else. My guess is you don’t have a true friend in the world.’
‘I have friends!’
‘Name one …’

Michael Marshall is a man in pain. Though very successful in his professional life, he has a string of failed relationships behind him, and has all but abandoned hope of finding personal happiness. Then, quite suddenly, Clare, a beautiful young art student, appears in his life, seeming to hold out the prospect of escape from all that entrammels him. The question is, does he have the strength to respond? Gregory Heath’s marvellously accomplished first novel is a moving meditation on the harm that is caused when people stop communicating with each other.

paperback  
ISBN: 978-1-904130-21-5 Extent: 176pp Category: Tag:

The Entire Animal

Independent, July 16th 2006
"Michael is a taxidermist in his late thirties. Socially awkward, especially around women, and preferring the company of his stuffed animals, he lives alone in a dormitory town outside Derby … a man at last coming to terms with the loss of his mother at an impressionable age, and belatedly learning how to let other people into his life and form meaningful relationships with them … [The Entire Animal] is a … nicely formed [book], the story progressing in an orderly fashion through a series of discrete, pleasingly realised vignettes – Michael feeling out of place at the attractive younger art student’s house party; Michael sharing a joke with his sister-in-law for the very first time; Michael at his dying father’s bedside, the right words to say catching in his throat. And, in the background, the thread of a story about the farming town’s recent suburbanisation and concomitant dwindling of community, and lots of … imagery to remind us that we are human animals, but stuffed with memories, emotion and desire." – Laurence Phelan

The Bloomsbury Review, May / June 2007
"The Entire Animal tells Michael’s story without a word to spare. So vacuum-packed is his world that it occurred to me early that if I started to talk about it, its essence would leak out, in the manner of the aroma of ground coffee or those smoked almonds I used to hanker for on airplanes. Long before the end, though, I stopped thinking about myself. I had no trouble becoming involved in the history of Woodington, Derbyshire, the life cycle of the hornet as thoughtfully observed by a man who has put away far too many beers, and the redolence of his pain." – Virginia Allen

"The hornet strips the soft wood from the fence posts at the edge of Michael’s tangled garden. She leaves tiny elongated marks on the timber; temporary, benign scars, such as a lover’s fingernails leave on willing flesh. She chews the wood, makes of it a gluey pulp, and returns with it to her new home.
She has something of the Ancient Greeks about her, in her primal mask of a face, in her talent for construction. With an infinite lightness of touch she applies and spreads the wood paste, invoking, and creating, the geometry of nature. She has almost completed the initial chamber, a perfect sphere containing six hexagonal cells that will cradle the first batch of eggs.
Eggs which within days of being laid will burst at the seams, releasing their wriggling contents. Larvae, which will need to be fed. Food, more food. We’re hungry, bring us more.
The hornet will fly to and fro until her wings ache, searching for scraps of meat, for lesser insects, for nourishment for her babies. If insects could think, she would think a woman’s work is never done.
But she would be wrong. Because although she has no way of knowing, those demanding larvae will soon become smaller versions of herself, an army of daughters that will take over the job of expanding the nest. They will rear the young, they will tend the sick, and she will spend the rest of her days in relative ease. External sources of danger – birds, humans, English weather – will be of no concern to her. She will remain in the nest, a servant only of her genes.
What must it be like to be her? A wholly natural creature, wholly a part of nature? Nature, which is unknowing, yet all-knowing? Nature, which doesn’t think, but does?
What must it be like to just do, with no thoughts of why you are doing, with no thoughts of whether or not you should? To have a purpose, and for that purpose to be enough?
Sometimes, when Michael is lost in his work, he seems to find the answer. Maybe he’s applying the final touches to a specimen, preening the feathers of a bird, perhaps. He’s got a fine pair of tweezers, laying back the feathers like tiles on a roof, teasing and coaxing them into position, attaining perfection in every fibre, bringing life to the lifeless. At times like this – which can last for hours – he forgets himself; he disappears; he’s gone.
But it can’t last forever, this absence, this non-feeling. Sooner or later it slips away. Because no one can work all the time. They have to live, too."

The Waywiser Press

Excerpts

"The hornet strips the soft wood from the fence posts at the edge of Michael’s tangled garden. She leaves tiny elongated marks on the timber; temporary, benign scars, such as a lover’s fingernails leave on willing flesh. She chews the wood, makes of it a gluey pulp, and returns with it to her new home.
She has something of the Ancient Greeks about her, in her primal mask of a face, in her talent for construction. With an infinite lightness of touch she applies and spreads the wood paste, invoking, and creating, the geometry of nature. She has almost completed the initial chamber, a perfect sphere containing six hexagonal cells that will cradle the first batch of eggs.
Eggs which within days of being laid will burst at the seams, releasing their wriggling contents. Larvae, which will need to be fed. Food, more food. We’re hungry, bring us more.
The hornet will fly to and fro until her wings ache, searching for scraps of meat, for lesser insects, for nourishment for her babies. If insects could think, she would think a woman’s work is never done.
But she would be wrong. Because although she has no way of knowing, those demanding larvae will soon become smaller versions of herself, an army of daughters that will take over the job of expanding the nest. They will rear the young, they will tend the sick, and she will spend the rest of her days in relative ease. External sources of danger – birds, humans, English weather – will be of no concern to her. She will remain in the nest, a servant only of her genes.
What must it be like to be her? A wholly natural creature, wholly a part of nature? Nature, which is unknowing, yet all-knowing? Nature, which doesn’t think, but does?
What must it be like to just do, with no thoughts of why you are doing, with no thoughts of whether or not you should? To have a purpose, and for that purpose to be enough?
Sometimes, when Michael is lost in his work, he seems to find the answer. Maybe he’s applying the final touches to a specimen, preening the feathers of a bird, perhaps. He’s got a fine pair of tweezers, laying back the feathers like tiles on a roof, teasing and coaxing them into position, attaining perfection in every fibre, bringing life to the lifeless. At times like this – which can last for hours – he forgets himself; he disappears; he’s gone.
But it can’t last forever, this absence, this non-feeling. Sooner or later it slips away. Because no one can work all the time. They have to live, too."

The Waywiser Press

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