She loved the bear. There was a depth in him she could not reach, could not probe and with her intellectual fingers destroy. She lay on his belly, he batted her gently with his claws; she touched his tongue with hers and felt its fatness. She explored his gums, his teeth that were almost fangs. She turned back his black lips with her fingers and ran her tongue along the ridge of his gums.
This is a book about a woman who has sex with a bear.
Lou is a middle-aged librarian, working for a Canadian historical institute, whose life has become stultifying. She's looking forward to a new task: traveling to a remote Ontario island to assess the library of Colonel Jocelyn Cary, a settler of the Canadian wilderness whose final descendant left both library and island to the institute. Besides an octagonal cabin and a few acres of nonarable bog, the estate also comes with a chained bear. Cary, it seems, always kept a bear on a chain; this is only the last in the series. Lou is warned that she must look after the bear as well; she should be fine, but one must remember it is, after all, a wild animal.
Lou spends months cataloguing Cary's library, slowly getting to know the bear. She discovers that if she takes the chain away, it will follow her to the water where they can swim together. At night it will walk in the house of its own accord and sit curled up in a warm corner of the house. Fascination turns to--well, lust. She begins by running her hands and feet through his plush fur and ends with spreading honey all over herself to let him lick away. And yes, she yearns for the act of actual intercourse but--how do I say this--her attempts to rouse the bear are mostly unsuccessful.
What is the bear? Well, it is the Canadian wilderness, of course. But it's not the wilderness that, like in Richard Adams' novel Shardik, comes and goes of its own will. The chained bear is a symbol of the wilderness that settlers like Cary tamed and subjugated. As Lou explores the library, she discovers hundreds of notes in Cary's hand about bears. We learn that the bear has a bone in his penis and the Inuit believed that the spirit of a polar bear would linger for three days in the place it was killed. For Cary, it seems, the bear was just another book, a way of stuffing the wilderness on a shelf and reading it until its secrets are divulged.
By unchaining it, in a sense, Lou sets it free. The bear, whose fur was matted and dingy when she arrived, becomes more lively, and so does she. In a mirror, she begins to look younger. The bear attracts her for the very reasons that Cary was unable to fully domesticate it: its knowledge and being are ancient but inaccessible, unspoken, of a different kind entirely than the existence of the books that can be catalogued and put away. The bear's wildness, sadly, is also reflected in the character of the indigenous Canadians who still populate the area. And there is something, too, in the bear's essential masculinity, which is both wildly compelling to Lou and horribly dangerous.
Despite the heavy symbolism, the novel is light, and the bear is never anything else but a bear. It offers mystery, freedom, but not companionship, not really. It lies essentially beyond Lou's understanding, and its gifts are revoked as freely as they are given. "She sometimes felt that he was God," Engel writes, and yet, contradictorily, "He served her." To embrace the bear is to live inside many contradictions: male and female, human and not, chained and wild. Contradictions that a library catalogue has no means to record.
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