MK Humanist Book Group Meeting 2 Aug 10 

Five members of the Book Group met at the Camphill Community Café for lunch to discuss the relative merits of “Remarkable Creatures” by Tracey Chevalier and “Cat’s Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut..

'Remarkable Creatures' by Tracey Chevalier

Based on a true story, “Remarkable Creatures” tells the intertwined stories of two very different Victorian women, brought together by their interest in the newly-discovered fossils of Dorset. Mary Anning was born into grinding poverty in Lyme Regis, Elizabeth Philpot and her two unmarried sisters into a more genteel version of the same, when her brother’s marriage forced them out of their comfortable home in Red Lion Square, London. Once installed in a modest cottage in Lyme in 1805, hatchet-jawed Elizabeth can pursue her interest in palaeontology, and tall Louise her gardening and salves. They find greater freedom and fulfilment than they ever did in London, though their prettier sister Margaret pines for a lost world of fashionable frivolity and the hope of a conventional marriage.

Mary and Elizabeth narrate alternate chapters, their relationship developing as they become mutually dependent. Elizabeth has to learn from the twelve-year-old Mary the hard graft of digging out the fossils, and under her tuition, Mary’s attitude to the fossils begins to change as both begin to realise the implications of their discoveries and question the received wisdom on the creation of life as expounded in the Bible. The relationship between the two women is often abrasive and fraught by misunderstanding. When Mary’s most famous discovery, the “crocodile”, is sold and exhibited in a London show as a freak dressed in human clothing with a cigar in its jaws and its tail deliberately straightened, she is amused and gratified by the attention it receives. Elizabeth is outraged by the trivialising of such a momentous event and the inaccuracy of the presentation; both women know by its shape that it cannot be a crocodile. In fact it is the first complete icthyosaur , more like a prehistoric dolphin. 

Various other contemporary characters are introduced, some invented, some real, like William Buckland, to explore the range of opinions excited by the publicity given to Mary’s discoveries. The writer resists the temptation to ridicule the precise calculations of Bishop Ussher as to the exact date when these creatures were drowned in Noah’s flood, and is careful to avoid any mention of Charles Darwin, whose work was not generally known at the time.

The details of character and setting, so important to this story, the male characters in particular, were seen as sometimes thin and unconvincing beside the more powerful evocation of the same period by John Fowles forty years ago in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.”