The Extinction Club
by Robert Twigger
Hamish Hamilton $220
ROBERT TWIGGER IS held in high regard by British critics, even though this is only his third book. The previous two have won literary awards.
I haven't read them, but assume they are written in the same quirky style of the eccentric Englishman who would really rather be doing something other than the dirty business of earning a living.
You get the impression that Twigger has only finished this book because his wife insists they need the publisher's advance to pay bills. This could be artifice, and therein lies the problem with The Extinction Club. Subtitled A mostly true story about two men, a deer and a writer, it is difficult to know where the real world ends and the author's imagination takes over. When I started reading it, I thought Twigger was making a weak attempt at a fabulist novel. An Oxford-educated poet with no knowledge of animal husbandry is asked by his ditzy American agent to turn out a book on a type of deer called Milu. They have freakish properties - the neck of a camel, the horns of a stag, the feet of a cow and the tail of a donkey. In China, their native habitat, they were known as Ssu-ssu Hsaing, meaning the 'beast with four characteristics that did not match'.
Wiped out during the Boxer rebellion, the few milu that had been shipped to Europe were all that remained and only through the concerted efforts of an English aristocrat and a French priest, did they survive.