Guest Review (3): WAACBO

My my, we are building quite a collection of the reviews here on this quest. It gives me utter joy in receiving so many. The below review is really quite glorious. I advise you all read it, and roll with it. May it move and shake you into writing your own review of one the long (soon to be short-) list books!

Guest Reviewer: Jemima Warren

Occupation: Works at Palgrave Macmillan

 We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves – Karen Joy Fowler



I hate novels about “issues”. And I especially hate ones about animal issues. So when I read the premise of Karen Joy Fowler’s tenth novel – look away from this review if you don’t want to know what that is – I was dubious. A chimpanzee raised in a human family? Here we go. Man’s inhumanity to beast, the evils of vivisection, why-can’t -all-of-creation-just-get-along? Blah blah blah.


There were certainly times when I felt WAACBO veered into that sort of humanitarian point-making. I never really felt that the character of Rosemary’s brother, Lowell, ever developed beyond a two-dimensional spokesman for the radical animal rights movement, for example.


But that aside, the novel is a complete joy, from hilarious observations about airline customer care, to the discovery of a lost ventriloquist’s dummy and, above all, the central voice of Rosemary, honest, funny and (often unwittingly) wise.


“They fuck you up, your mum and dad”, as Larkin has taught us. The fucking up in Fowler’s novel is of both the most unusual and the most ordinary kind. Her realisations about herself and about her family resonate with us all. Sentences like, “I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up. I made a mental note to remember this in my own life, but it got lost the way mental notes do”, strike a pang in the heart of any child, those with siblings and those without.


Reaching the end of the novel, like growing up, you realise that the way you thought things were, is actually, quite wrong. We are, like the title, all completely beside ourselves in that, going on in parallel to the things we tell ourselves, is the actual truth about our existence. Towards the end of the novel, this exchange between Rosemary and her mother:


“…You were a happy, happy child”
“Was I? I don’t remember”


Families are prone to develop collective memory. This novel wonderfully explores how fallacious – and dangerous – that can be.