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5.0 out of 5 stars
No One Can Resist the Call, Jul 7 2000
A small, loving family faces ruin due to its inability to mesh with harsh, workaday New York City. Bob Duke, the traditional breadwinner, a poetic, impractical man, reaches the end of his rope (and money) and seeks any out. The "out" comes when a wolf in Central Park Zoo catches his gaze and "captures" him. On a business trip to Atlanta, Bob transforms temporarily into a wolf, wreaking havoc in a hotel. Upon his return to New York he changes again, more-or-less permanently. This metamorphosis marks the beginning of a crazy rollercoaster ride leading from a filthy dog pound to the Canadian forests as cops, SWAT teams, hunters, coy-dogs, and everyone else rise up to hunt him."If only he could talk! 'This is all so silly,' he would say. 'I'm about the least offensive person you could meet.'" (p. 205, TOR ed.) If The Wild is a horror novel, the horror is learning how truly helpless and terrified one would be, trapped, fully aware, in an animal's form. Bob can't talk or write, his hands are now unmanipulative paws, and virtually anyone who sees him tries to kill him. His plight is described with the poignancy of Olaf Stapledon's bucolic novel Sirius, but the pursuit of Bob Duke races along with the frenzy of a Jackie Chan movie. Bob Duke, used to pate de foie gras and caviar, must eat diseased rats and Drano-soaked garbage. He fights dogs, wolves, a child-rapist, and an extremely unfriendly bear. He nearly drowns, freezes, and starves in the woods. Meanwhile, wife Cindy and son Kevin search for him, aided by a tired old Native American shaman and a Dana-Scully-type psychiatrist. I have read many stories of shape-shifters; such characters usually are loners from the start. (In Andre Norton novels like The Jargoon Pard, for instance, the heroes are outsiders, nearly friendless if not actually hated by their peers.) In The Wild, Bob Duke's family suffers almost as much anguish and pain as Bob himself, and their life on the run is as hellish as his. This is an obvious course to take but one I don't remember reading in a lycanthropy novel before. What I have read often enough is that the animal's spirit somehow pollutes the human soul -- intelligence fades, he/she becomes bloodthirsty, psychotic, or downright evil. The Wild describes a perfect melding of human intelligence with wolf instinct and supernormal senses -- Bob can hunt down a deer and simultaneously feel sorry he has to kill "Bambi". "And he would die having had one of the highest of experiences: to be a raw animal, in the body of an animal, with all his human consciousness intact." (p. 304) The human mind is enhanced, not soiled, by the lupine. There are scenes of wolf dominance-submission in The Wild that may offend some readers, and Bob Duke is such a loser as a human that some may not sympathize with him. None of this has lessened The Wild's impact on me. It became my favorite book the moment I began it, and nine years later I doubt anything will threaten its supremacy. I will simply follow it "deep into the freedom and safety of the wild." (the end)
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