Bear by Marian Engel

Watch, Study #1, artwork of Kari Lehr​

If you’ve been around long enough, you may remember the kerfuffle that took place when Bear was first published. It has the distinction of “most controversial novel ever written in Canada”, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia, but also won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction later that same year. High praise indeed.
 
It has since gone on to be re-released by several publishers, including McClelland & Stewart’s Kanata Classics, with my beautiful friend Kari Lehr’s wonderful piece, Watch, Study #1, chosen for the cover art. It was because of that honour, that I picked it up to reread.
 
It is a slim book coming in at barely over 100 pages and is, on the surface, a straightforward tale, famously the story of a lonely female archivist who travels to northern Ontario and begins an erotic relationship with a bear, 
 
But it is so much more. It is, at once, a feminist folk-tale, an environmental plea, a failed love story, a questioning of colonialism. All readings are correct.
 
The language is again, on the surface, simple, but honest and raw and startingly beautiful.
When we first meet Lou, she is an archivist “scurrying through the tube of winter”. She is soon given the rare opportunity to spend the warmer months north of Toronto on an island deep in cottage country. She is sent to the grand home of an eccentric colonel to catalogue his library which has been left to the Historical Institute.
 
When she arrives, the “land is hectic with new green” and she has “an odd sense of being reborn”. Lou is lonely and in a rut: “Life in general had a grudge against her.” She describes her past sexual encounters critically: “what she disliked in men was not their eroticism, but their assumption that women had none.”
 
Soon after arriving, Lou learns there is a semi-tame bear living on the property, chained in the back shed. She begins feeding the bear and taking it for walks, swimming and playing in the water together, later lounging by the fire and having sex. Of course, it is this last bit that attracts attention.
 
At times, her encounters with the bear seem imaginary and we are left to wonder if he is an allegorical creature meant to represent men, or society, or nature. But the details are so specific, and we can smell him, feel his fur, and later his tongue as “fat, freckled, pink and black”. As the “woods had lost the first innocence of spring”, so too does Lou.
 
“They lived sweetly and intensely together. She knew that her flesh, her hair, her teeth and her fingernails smelled of bear, and this smell was very sweet to her… But he was good to her. He grunted, sat across from her, and grinned. Once laid a soft paw on her naked shoulder, almost lovingly.”
 
While Lou finds liberation with her erotic encounter with the bear, she also uncovers her place in the world, which in turn prods the reader to ask uncomfortable questions.
 
If you have read Bear, you will have your own interpretation. Your experience will be different from mine, or from the thousands and thousands of readers who have sought this thoroughly original, wise and witty book. You will never forget it.
 
And in the meantime, happy reading!
Joni