And behind the octagon – monument to human whimsy, to the persistence of the personality in the wilderness – is a chained-up bear: half-size, scraggly and dull in the eyes, kept alive on dog food. It has exactly as much plot as I like: Lou, a librarian suffering a romantic drought, goes to spend the summer in an octagonal house on an island, where she will catalogue the library of one Colonel Cary, imposing ‘numerical order on a structure devised internally and personally by a mind her numbers would teach her to discover’. Is it a metaphor for our relationship to nature? Fuck off. Is Bear one of those 1970s books about growing out your armpit hair? Kind of, but not only. There is also something timeless to be written. Jokes about never-to-be-seen footage, enjoinments to hear every sentence in Werner Herzog’s voice. It perhaps contains a tie-in with The Revenant (2015), and an anecdote about the time your mother saw it in the cinema by mistake and texted: ‘The bear did not rape Leo as was reported.’ It perhaps contains a reference to the tame Instagram bear Stepan, whose duty it has somehow become to sensually embrace a variety of hot Russian models in fields. It involves the aforementioned cover art, 1970s plaid shirt feminism, the rediscovery of this book every two years by roving groups of content foragers, who must live on the phallic morels they find in the woods. There is a modern essay to be written about this work. The bear of the title looms over her shoulders, a Muppet designed to be sexual, smiling inside the dark cavern of his face and presumably doing her from behind. Her tits are perfect, like two drawers of a card catalogue. I am talking about the notorious mass market paperback of Marian Engel’s 1976 masterpiece, where the body of a softcore librarian is completely laid open to us, surrounded by flowing silk.
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