JANE AMONG FRIENDS

A predatory leopard plagues a woman’s cattle farm in Africa as she struggles to devise a response with the help of a scientifically minded gorilla.

In this novel, Jane Porter lives on a cattle farm in Kenya with her husband, John Greystoke, an Englishman of notable descent. They suffer regular attacks by a leopard they call Sheeta, and as the losses mount, they try to devise a plan to thwart him. But Sheeta turns out to be a cunning hunter and only grows bolder over time, even taunting their futile efforts to capture him. Meanwhile, the couple meet Chulk, a 400-pound gorilla endowed with astonishingly precocious intelligence, capable of speech and rational inference. As a result of Chulk’s preoccupation with abstract, intellectual concerns, he’s “rebuffed by his clan.” Under Jane’s patient tutelage, Chulk becomes extraordinarily well-versed in the intricacies of scientific investigation and helps Jane brainstorm a way to defend her family’s land against Sheeta’s costly assaults. After John dies trying to stop Sheeta, Jane is left in charge of the farm, though she finds herself at loggerheads with her son, Jack, who has old-fashioned ideas about gender roles and pretensions about the “Greystoke destiny.” Chulk, a “magnificent scientific discovery,” deepens his reflections to include not just science, but also the whole of life, displaying the “avid curiosity of a social anthropologist.” His ruminations extend to philosophical and theological matters as well, and he engages in profound exchanges with Jane, a devout Quaker, about the nature of the universe, conversations intelligently depicted by Barnes (The Beauty Queen of Bonthe and Other Stories of West Africa, 2018, etc.). The plot is a remarkably inventive one, and the author raises provocative questions about the relationships between different species—John at one point is deeply attracted to a female gorilla. In addition, Barnes sensitively tackles the issue of the societal constraints placed on Jane both as a woman and a senior citizen—she is forced to squarely confront what she calls the “handicaps of my age and (particularly) my gender.” This is a peculiar but captivating tale that readers will not soon forget.

An engrossing and philosophically challenging meditation on what it means to be a living being worthy of moral respect.