Monkeying about with the novel
Cross-species fiction nowadays is a lot more adult, in both senses of that word, than “The Wind in the Willows”
A WOMAN falls in love with an ape. A whore turns into a pig. A man wakes up beside his girlfriend to find she has become a chimp. Those are the themes of three current novels by top-selling authors from Denmark, France and England respectively. None obviously copies the others. Yet their joint fascination with seriously crossbreed love is more than coincidence. Evidently “coupling out”—romance with animals—is in.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Monkeying about with the novel”
From the May 10th 1997 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the editionDiscover more
Pep Guardiola, football’s greatest coach, is in a bind
A serial winner is learning how to lose
The Economist’s word of the year for 2024
The Greeks knew how to talk about politics and power
What do feta, cucumbers and cottage cheese have in common?
Social media and the internet are changing how people cook and relate to food
Germany’s former chancellor sets out to restore her reputation
But her new memoir is unlikely to change her critics’ minds
The best books of 2024, as chosen by The Economist
Readers will never think the same way again about games, horses and spies
What to read to understand Elon Musk
The world’s richest man was shaped by science fiction