A very special species
Graham Stewart
THE EXTINCTION CLUB by Robert Twigger Hamish Hamilton, £12.99, pp. 180, ISBN 0140285040 Few species have led a more protected life than the Milu. For a thousand years this extraordinary breed of deer had but one habitat. Happily, it was the private park of the Emperor of China. Nurtured there and selectively culled by elaborately organised hunts, they were safe from the less discriminating forces that had made them extinct in the wild. The world beyond the perimeter fence was ignorant of their existence.
All this changed when the Celestial Ruler's walls began to crumble. In 1865 a Basque missionary, Pere David, became the first Westerner to catch a glimpse of the animal through a section of the Emperor's fence that was being repaired. What he saw was a deer with the hooves of a cow, a donkey-like tails a camel's neck and a stag's horns. The hybrid animal, he discovered, was called by the Chinese 'Su Bu Xiang', meaning 'none of the four'. Successfully bribing a sentry, Pere David had the remains of one of these peculiar creatures embalmed and shipped to Paris in a diplo
matic bag. Eventually live exports followed and although most died off, the eccentric Herbrand Russell, 11th Duke of Bedford, managed to get them to thrive and multiply on his estate at Woburn Abbey.
In doing so, he saved the species, for the interest of outsiders in China determined their extinction there. The international expeditionary force sent to quell the Boxer revolt in 1900 not only looted the treasures of the Forbidden City, it also finished off the Milu. Coming upon the 20-30 deer still remaining (most had fallen victim to the consequences of severe flooding five years earlier) the occupying troops loaded their rifles and enjoyed venison for their dinner.
The Extinction Club is nominally about Pere David's deer, but given half a chance Robert Twigger's fast and original mind ranges over wider terrain. His subject matter is as much the frailty and endurance of knowledge as the fate of rare species. In trying to smoke out the 'foreign devils' from the British Legation, the Boxer rebels set fire to the Hanlin Academy, destroying much of the largest repository of unprinted manuscripts in the world, including many of the 11,000 volumes of the Yung Lo Ta Tien, an encyclopaedia that contained 'the substance of all the classical, historical, philosophical and literary works hitherto published, embracing astronomy, geography, geomancy, the occult, medicine, Buddhism, Taoism and the arts'.
One moment the author is searching for a lost — presumed stolen — tome missing from its burial site deep in the catacombs of the Bodleian Library, the next he is concerned with the fate of the second-hand bookstalls of the Ezbekiya Gardens. In between, he fantasises about shoot-outs in the iron stacks of the London Library. Demonstrating once again his abilities as a writer, Twigger prances effortlessly between the absurd and the profound with the feather-light assurance of a prima ballerina.
No writer who takes his work seriously wants his most enduring prose to be the inscription on his gravestone. In The Extinction Club, literary last rites assume a casual finality. Phoning his publisher's warehouse where the unsold copies of his book are stored, Twigger's alter ego, is informed, 'Sorry, you're pulped, mate.' Consequently, he hopes to escape such a fate in future by seeking admission to the survivor's guild — to write the 'breakthrough' book that will secure fame and the prospect of artistic longevity. The Extinction Club certainly deserves such success.
And what has become of the Milu? In 1986, 22 of Woburn Abbey's herd were flown to Beijing and settled into the area of what was once the imperial deer park where 121 years before a Western missionary had seen something moving in the undergrowth through a gap in the wall. Cast thy bread upon the waters . . .
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