In lesser hands, such whirlwind antics might juxtapose oddly with the profound questions the novel raises about animal rights, sibling loyalty, parental subterfuge, self-delusion, guilt and the notion of ownership. For what better way to defy the gravitational pull of psychic pain than to cavort madly beyond its stratosphere?
Drunken capers with a purloined Madame Defarge puppet and a paranoid apartment janitor ensue. Soon she has hurtled headlong into a dangerous friendship with manic wild-child Harlow, a drama student with Honorary Chimp and Fern Substitute written all over her in giant letters. While room-mates swap horror stories about their tamely freakish families, Rosemary knows better than to join in: her own background is a room-silencer.īut she can't act normal for long. The nickname "Monkey-girl" dogs Rosemary's school years, and her deep-rooted identity dysmorphia sets her apart from her fellow students at college, where she is keen to shake off "the uncanny valley response" that her off-kilter body language elicits in others. "What seems not to have been anticipated was my own confusion." This is exactly what Fern did," Rosemary recalls. "Most home-raised chimps, when asked to sort photographs into piles of chimps and humans, make only the one mistake of putting their own picture into the human pile. But it's Rosemary's problems as a young adult – informed by her "simian" past – that shape the narrative. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves resonates with Rosemary's grief for her missing alter ego and sister, and for the adored Lowell, who communicates with the family only through the occasional cryptic postcard. The girls' imposed "twin‑sisterhood" was part of an animal-human behaviour experiment conducted for five years by their psychologist father, before being abruptly terminated.
There's no way of reviewing this novel without disclosing the shattered Cooke family's not-so-secret secret, deftly held back until page 77: that Rosemary's missing sister, Fern, was a chimpanzee. But "weird on stilts" lies just over the horizon. In time, she will be left with only a baffling palimpsest of sibling memories, recounted through caustic, guilt-tinged flashbacks. More silence follows and little motormouth Rosemary, recognising a double taboo when she sees one, packs away her enthusiastically learned vocabulary and becomes an almost silent child. When he commits a series of crimes in the name of animal rights and becomes a fugitive from the FBI, a second hole is blasted in the already shaken family.
Soon afterwards, Rosemary's stormy teenage brother Lowell absconds, also without discussion, leaving her bereft again.
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