Ark Baby

Synopsis: Liz Jensen's second novel, Ark Baby, is a dark, randy and riotous romp back to the future featuring twin plot lines as tightly twisted as a double helix. The novel (if not the story) kicks into gear on New Year's Eve 1999 when a sudden, heavy rainfall over Britain signals the end of fertility on the sceptred isle; with the turn of the millennium, every last specimen of British womanhood is rendered mysteriously barren. In the aftermath of this event, child-starved couples start turning to lower primates to satisfy their baby lust; enter veterinarian Bobby Sullivan, the hapless hero of Jensen's quirky meditation on evolution and survival of the fittest. After accidentally killing a client's beloved macaque monkey and being charged with murder, Bobby escapes to a remote northern seaside town called Thunder Spit and eventually gets involved with two slightly hirsute twins whom he manages to impregnate--the first fertile women in England since the millennium.
Not content to chronicle Bobby's adventures in Thunder Spit around the dawn of the new millennium, Jensen weaves in the 19th-century adventures of foundling Tobias Phelps as counterpoint. Discovered abandoned in the Thunder Spit church by a childless vicar and his wife, Tobias is raised by the couple as their own, but his unusual appearance (squashed features, odd feet, hairy body) spur him to find his biological parents. As Bobby muddles towards 21st-century parenthood and Tobias gets tangled up in Victorian England's fascination with the theories of Darwin, the two plots begin to converge in a welter of diary entries, exotic recipes, strange artefacts and curious coincidences. By the end of Ark Baby readers might well conclude that far from being "red in tooth and claw", nature has one hell of a sense of humour.

Review: The book blurb has a comment from the New York Times which tells you to think of this book as 'Monty Python's Origin of Species' which is spot on. This is an absolutely bonkers take on Darwin's theory of evolution.
'The book starts with a prologue, following the Ark (no, not that one, this is a 19th century ship) as it makes it's way towards England with a cargo full of animals.

'In the beginning, the ocean. Huge. Ink-dark beneath a black sky. The sunlight chinking through: bright, dangerous. beneath the bunching clouds, rain slashes the waves, walls of glass that crash in brutal shards against the Ark's hull. The vessel is a speck on the face of the deep. A toy of wood and string. The air rumbles. Inside his padded leather cabin in the Ark, the Human awakes lurching in the gathering storm. Flings out an arm, grasps the hip-flask, glugs at blood-red claret. Then sputters and curses. His language: the Queen's English. "B*ggeration"

Something is wrong below deck, the Human can hear grunts, whistles, snarls, growls and the shrill scream of a woman. He mutters a word to himself and that word is 'mutiny' All you then know is that some sort of catastrophe befalls the Ark and a month later, a woman arrives at the workhouse in Greenwich, she is alive but frozen, her cloak has turned to ice like a rigid tent and the tutu that she is wearing sticks out horizontally from her hips. The nuns have to crack the tutu off of her and plonk her into a tub of warm water. But then they notice her condition and quickly call for a midwife. There's something not quite right about the infant though, word quickly spreads that the Frozen Woman's offspring is a child of the Devil, and the workhouse being a Christian establishment, throws the pair of them out. She picks her way through the snow towards the twinkling lights of the Travelling Fair of Danger and Delight which is encamped in Greenwich, and when the fair heads northwards the Frozen Woman leaves with them and is never seen again in Greenwich.

The story then jumps to 2005. All British women have become infertile. Here we are introduced to Elvis loving, dissipated, London veterinary surgeon, Bobby Sullivan. You may expect Bobby's patients to be mostly cats, dogs and rabbits but no, ever since the National Egg Bank closed it's waiting list to women over thirty, Bobby has been seeing ten or twelve macaques a week, also chimps, orang-utans, spider monkeys and the occasional gibbon or baboon. His clients now are the 'pseudo mum's' of these primates, dressing them up like babies and shampooing their hair etc. The real fanatics would actually even 'shave them and openly breast feed them in the waiting room'. It's enough to make a man run for the hills. And this is exactly what Bobby does after he inadvisably (and after a bribe of a thousand euro's) colludes with his client Mr Mann, to put to sleep poor little pink dressed, nappy wearing Giselle, a sweet little female macaque. Bobby's assistant, and love interest (in the loosest sense of the word) Holly, is highly offended and resigns and when Mrs Mann herself learns the truth, Bobby finds himself in hot water. So he does what any responsible person would do, he leaves in a hurry, changes his name to Buck de Savile and heads for a peninsula called Thunder Spit.

Staying in Thunder Spit but travelling back to 1845 we are introduced to Parson and Mrs Phelps. They are childless due to a unfortunate incident which befell the Parson as a young man ... he had been obliged to strangle an adder found in his knickerbockers with his bare hands ... so imagine their surprise and delight when they discover a foundling babe left on the floor of the Church of St Nicholas. The baby has a terrible wound to it's lower back, and there are great fears that he cannot possibly survive but 'being blessed by God (though in a later, more cynical version this changed to cursed by the Devil)' he makes it through the night. They name this baby Tobias Phelps. He's a strange child, for the first five years of his life he can only grunt, he's covered in red hair, has a very odd gait and unnaturally shaped feet (you know where this is heading don't you!). Still, they love him, he is the Lord's own chosen child. Years later, when Mrs Phelps is on her deathbed she extracts a promise from Tobias that he will never visit the Travelling Fair of Danger and Delight, but she may as well of asked for snow in July, when the fair returns to Thunder Spit, the temptation is too great.

Also in 1845 in London, we meet Dr Scrapie, his wife Mrs Charlotte Scrapie or the 'Laudanum Empress' as she is known (a nickname which alludes to the chronic addiction which helps fuel her psychic abilities) and their daughter Violet. Dr Scrapie is chief taxidermist to Queen Victoria (or the Royal Hippopotamus as he calls her) and he is currently working on a ridiculous project stuffing animals from around the globe, removing their genitalia, dressing them in clothes and giving them blue glass eyes, for part of her Animal Kingdom collection. Also newly introduced to the household is Monsieur Cabillaud, a chef who, as luck would have it, has no objection to cooking 'unusual meats', in fact he has a flair for it. The Empress has to be my favourite character, she's hilarious. She's full of proclamations and psychic predictions, which nobody else believes or pays heed to ...

'There will be two world wars. As a result, a million skulls will be strewn all over France. But on the more positive side, there will be something known as long-life milk' ... 'There will be heat seeking missiles, and split crotch panties. Not to mention a substance called Play-Doh'' ... 'There will be gambling machines called one-armed bandits. And artists will display their own excrement in galleries'

Somehow all these ingredients are mixed together until their connections become clear. The Empress remains in the story even after she's dead, as a ghost inhabiting her old residence which now belongs to the parent's of Bobby Sullivan's new girlfriends (who are a pair of hirsute twin's with an odd habit of keeping their socks on at all times). After an unexpected encounter involving a strange woman, blackmail and a pickle jar, Parson Phelps abandons Tobias, he abandons religion too and is taken raving to the local sanatorium. Tobias doesn't quite know what to make of it, who was the woman and what is pickled in the jar? Charles Darwin has just published his 'Origin of Species' (indeed both he and Henry Salt get talking parts in this novel) to a general outcry. In 2005 the pregnant twins (but then at least half of the British female population are experiencing phantom pregnancies in what is known as a nine month period of insanity .. there is a 'Euro Fertility Reward' of five million euro's) are busy researching their family tree and Bobby (or Buck as we now call him) is wondering about the stuffed 'Gentleman Monkey' that was in the Scrapie's loft, at first he thinks it might be valuable but after some intensive research he realises it's much more important than that. As the synopsis says this is a bit of a bawdy romp, reminiscent at times of Tristram Shandy etc, but I didn't mind that because Liz Jensen has a deft comic touch and it was totally in keeping with the story. It's dark, humorous, clever and really enjoyable.