Man viewed with scorn by a cat . .
Harriet Waugh
STRAY by A. N. Wilson
Walker Books, £8.95
Visit any bookshop and look at the Cat, Dog and Horse Section. Man's best friends are big business. Although many of the books are to do with grooming, breed- ing, feeding and training animals, a good many are written in celebration of them. Celebrating animal life roughly divides into anecdotal stuff concerning the writer's relationship with their pets, and fictions, often written from the point of view of the Pet itself. It is into this latter category that A. N. Wilson's Stray falls. It would be tempting to leave it there for the million or so browsing cat-lovers to discover, except for the fact that A. N. Wilson has pulled a very distinguished cat out of his hat. It is an excellent book and deserves instead to sell
to the very few novel buyers who keep most novelists in modest penury.
Stray concerns the adventures of a Tom cat sometimes known as Pufftail. He re- counts his life story as a salutary lesson to his young grandson, Kitchener. I will only tell you a few of the amusing, romantic and tragic incidents because I hope you will all buy it, read it and pass it on to your children. Suffice it to say that Pufftail is very fluffy and in youth suffered the indignity of being called by that name. He considers it demeaning to have a name at all and holds the bearers of names and the `two footers' who give them to cats in the greatest contempt. How this natural scorn for humans turns into violent dislike is at the heart of the story.
The first shock to his system comes when he and his brother Tom are wrenched from a happy litter and sold to a horrid pet-shop owner. By good fortune they are bought by a nice old woman known as Granny Harris. But their tribulations really begin when they end up in the possession of her revolting daughter June and June's quar- relsome husband Jim. Tom suffers a parti- cularly nasty death and Pufftail takes to the road as a stray. He is befriended by Anglican nuns, bullied in a communist cat commune, tortured by vivisectionists and finds true love (after, a rumbustiously satisfactory sex life) only to experience the tragedy of bereavement. Love Story has nothing on it.
There is some excellent satirical fun poked at humans as Pufftail takes a cat's view of their inscrutable ways, and the novel is full of felicities as in this passage:
You, young kitten, can imagine what it was like waking up to a dawn-chorus of birds. But to explain that music to a human being you would have to ask him to imagine what it was like to wake up to a beautiful choir, and then to realise that the music emanated from a group of singing fried eggs or harmonious lamb chops. That is, the music was im- mediately and inextricably mixed up with my knowledge that it was coming from the throats of my breakfast.
P. G. Wodehouse could not have express- ed himself on the subject of a cat's break- fast better than this. Although such pas- sages will be lost on most children, it is the reason why Stray is a book for the whole family. There are few enough such books. The Unlucky Family by Mrs de la Pasture is one of these happy novels that like Stray can give pleasure to children and parents alike, and are particularly enjoyable read aloud, as the plot and the language are accessible to children while the phraseolo- gy and sentiments have a sophistication that tickles the adult. In the end, though, Stray will continue to be read mainly by children, and I am prepared to bet that it will come, in the process of time, to be a child's classic — and, who knows, may well be the book for which A. N. Wilson will most be remembered.
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