Naming the animals
R V Bailey welcomes a new look at some Bible stories
Even if you couldn’t read it, in previous centuries the Bible was thought important. It had a kind of magic power. It might even be useful: being able to quote a verse of Psalm 51 might save you from the gallows. Nowadays the Bible, for many people, would be handier as a doorstop. Like the tins at the back of the larder, it’s out-of-date.
The Bible’s stories seem rather like fairy stories that parents might tell their children – if, indeed, they can find the stories in such a sea of unreadable small print double-columns.
Though much was hoped of them, modern translations have never much caught on. The Bible lives in the imagination as a Big Black Book and the fact that the Victorians revered it seals its fate. No, thank you. It’s not our thing.
Robert Maxwell’s book Naming the Animals offers a different approach. Here are twenty stories, told in poems, about humans in a variety of predicaments encountering God. The stories do involve people – people like us, and often, like us, pretty stupid.
But far more interesting and important are the animals. And animals are never old-fashioned, never out-of-date. You can trust them: they have personalities.
Animals can almost talk, and in this book they certainly have opinions. Creatures of all sorts are here – donkeys and asses, owls and raven, pigs and cocks and whales and lions – even spiders (though they hold their tongues) play a part.
Nobody talks down to the young reader, either. ‘This is an account of an armaments race,’ is the brisk opening line of the poem about Moses and the plagues of Egypt. Importantly, there’s also a footloose unidentified commentator, who chips in from time to time, offering his own views. ‘Why did God tell a porky?’ he ponders, thinking of the serpent and Eve:
Was it for Adam’s good?
Or had he mixed the labels
Where the deadly nightshade stood?
In the story of Noah and the flood, he (clearly a conservationist) worries about the possible extinction of some species during all that time at sea – ‘One hopes they’d bred in the ark…’ Indeed, they might well not have bred, for tempers had frayed. It needed Mrs Noah to rule the roost.
This dry, sometimes ironic voice is one of the most engaging features of the stories, refusing the prevailing narrative, asking what are, after all, some pretty obvious questions. He worries about the way Balaam treats the donkey (‘the only female among’ the characters in the story, he notes). After all, in telling Balaam to go to Balak, the angel was just obeying ‘divine instructions’ – which the anonymous commentator dismisses as ‘(Never a wholly satisfactory explanation)…’
Furthermore, the angel:
…was prepared to see the donkey
Maltreated…
How can that be reconciled
With the most elementary guidelines
Of the DSPCA?
The stories are good ones. They remain intrinsically interesting, and they remain useful to us – children and grown-ups alike. The volume itself is in every way – cover, typography, layout and illustrations – a visual delight. I can think of no other collection quite like this, in its gentle lyricism, its open-mindedness, and the practicality of its vision. It introduces serious questions into a world of surprising possibilities. And it’s amazingly modestly priced.
Naming the Animals by Robert Maxwell is available for £10 (+ £2.50 p&p) from the author at Pitt Court Manor, North Nibley, Dursley, Gloucestershire GL11 6EL.
