I don’t think I have ever seen a wolf in real life. There are a
family of Spanish wolves in Blackpool Zoo but I am not big on zoos so will
never see them. I’ve never been to Edinburgh Zoo or the one in Regents Park;
the only zoos I can definitely say I have visited are the ones in Kabul, forty
years ago and the Safari Park in San Diego, also decades ago. So long in fact
that I can barely remember it.
I don’t think I have any particular affection or fondness for
wolves. Obviously, they have been persecuted almost to extinction and I am
sorry about that but if I were to support an animal charity, and I don’t I can
find twenty more important animals worth conserving I think, than a wolf. There
is a guy trying to re-introduce them to Scotland I believe but he is meeting
tough opposition. Some people however do seem to have an empathy for them; they
represent something, wildness,
tragic, mysterious perhaps that appeals to their soul. How else really can you
explain the misuse of the name wolf in so many works of literature and film. Dances with Wolves isn’t about wolves; Wolf of Wall Street isn’t about wolves. The Grey isn’t about wolves There is a
TV Comedy show running at the moment called Raised
by Wolves that definitely doesn’t have any wolves in it and recently we
watched a stylish French drama called
Witnesses which had a wolf in the credit sequence then in the final
episode an unexplained appearance of two wolves in a cage which had zilch to do
with the plot or narrative arc. Metaphor: but for what? Wildness? Mystery?
Tragedy?
I have just finished a book called Tell the Wolves I’m Home [Carol Rifka Brunt]with many rave reviews
on Amazon that has absolutely nothing to do with wolves and indeed I saw that
it was the debut novel of an author with endless credits at the back and thanks
to the entire staff at Picador and Pan and unworthy though the thought may be
but I felt that some New York editor somewhere said, ‘We gotta have the word Wolf in the title to catch attention;
people love wolf stories’. So they did. And for much the same reason they stuck
a wolf in the opening credits of Witnesses
and Raised by Wolves.
Tell the
Wolves I’m Home I had to
force myself to finish; all 350-pages. Not aimed at me, more for the Rainbow
Rowell reader.
Best wolf story ever is Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, of course. I’ve read it at least twice.
