On the one hand, we have the playful, affectionate and fun-loving little being who enjoyed singing, dancing, and games. But on the other, there are his threats of violence. Against the Irvings: "You don't know what damage or harm I might do if I were roused. I could kill you all if I liked but I won't."
In the 1920's, James Irving, a once-successful piano dealer in the UK and Canada, moved to the Isle of Man to become a subsistence farmer with wife Margaret and daughter Voirrey. It was a step down in life for Irving, and one he hoped would not be permanent, but what he lost in prestige and money he gained in, I guess, companionship and notoriety: the Irvings' house, Doarlish Cashen, soon proved to be haunted by a talking mongoose named Gef. (That's pronounced like "Jeff.")
Life with Gef, as described in Christopher Josiffe's extensive investigation into the strange story, could be exhausting. At first, Gef displayed nothing but malice toward the Irvings, but after a while he became something like a member of the family, singing, gossiping, and joking with them. He throws things (he has great aim); he travels speedily across the Isle of Man and brings back news that no one else could know; he steals sandwiches, apparently, from the workers at a nearby bus stop. Sometimes, his attentions are unwanted: he keeps the Irvings up for hours at night asking questions and chattering behind the walls of the farmhouse.
Gef's aversion to being seen--those who claim to have seen him have done so only briefly, and the blurry Bigfoot-like photos that purport to be Gef sitting on a post outside Doarlish Cashen are so inscrutable that some have guessed they're of a coiled scarf or stole--seems like a very good point in evidence of his being a hoax. And yet the picture of Gef that Josiffe paints--needy, mercurial, short-tempered, playful, ribald--is so complex that Gef appears on the page as a very real character. And although Josiffe enumerates, in great detail, the numerous possibilities about Gef's identity (Is he a hoax put on by the Irvings? A trick played by Margaret and Voirrey against Jim? A pukka, a poltergeist, or a witch's familiar?), it's clear he wants very much to believe that Gef is real, or at least interpret the evidence in the most Gef-friendly light. That's a positive feature, I think, of the book; a more skeptical narrative about the Irvings might be a fairer book but it certainly wouldn't be a more fun one.
It's a fun story, but also a tragic one: Gef's resident attracts the attention of spiritualists and parapsychologists all over the world, but if Gef is a hoax put on by Jim Irving for money, it's a dismal failure. A book is written by visitors, much more critical of Irving than he'd believed, and for which he receives nothing. Through it all he insists he's actually a very private individual, not desirous of the attention that Gef brings; Gef's obsessive and outrageous attentions to the Irvings looks positively friendly and loving when compared with the attentions of writers and ghost-seekers who want to hunt Gef down but shunt the Irvings aside in the process. And Josiffe does such a convincing job bring Gef to life it's sad to read a late interview with an elderly Voirrey, saying she wished that Gef had never visited them at all.
The book didn't leave me with a real clear idea of who or what Gef was. I don't really believe in talking mongooses, or spirits in the shape of mongooses. My guess is that it was an elaborate prank perpetrated by Voirrey that got out of hand for everyone involved. But that's hardly a fun thought. Better to think of Gef as alive still, zipping around the Isle of Man, making (and torturing) new friends.
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