The White Puma (R.D. Lawrence)- A Review

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Coyo-T

Well-Known Member
Oct 3, 2016
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Been meaning to post about this for a while- it happened to be the book I read right after finishing The Stand and my thoughts were still turned toward this board while I was reading it.;-D

This is a relatively short "natural history" type novel where a non-human animal is the primary protagonist; these books were much more common in decades past, but even by the time of this one's publication (1990) they had sadly dwindled away to virtual extinction. The lead character, as the title suggests, is a male white puma in British Columbia, though he shares the spotlight with other pumas (chiefly his mother) and an assortment of human characters representing various interests and viewpoints.

The puma parts of this book are by far the best parts. The author, R.D. Lawrence, was a noted naturalist, and though fictional these sections of the pumas' lives as they hunt, kill, and interact with each other feel "real", like the reader is there and observing them in the wild. It initially follows the female puma as she must find a suitable den and raise her young, but eventually transitions to the "white tom" as he matures and learns to survive on his own.

The other part of this book deals with humans- and as much as I want to like these parts, they feel too simplistically written. There was potential for some interesting characters- two of the human protagonists are poachers, but rather than flanderizing them into just horrible people, they are instead portrayed as just ignorant, having grown up with the need to poach game for food in a family environment that actively punished compassion toward wild animals. However, all of these details are just briefly mentioned without really going anywhere, and the "good guys" (the environmentalists, of course) don't really have any flaws to speak of (though they appear so late in the narrative that there really isn't time to establish them, despite their sudden importance!) The other human characters are, for the most part, just "there" without any development (most of them being greedy, minor antagonists.) This is made more frustrating by the fact that the last few sections of the book are all about the humans interacting with each other; the cats disappear entirely past a certain point (though fortunately, the book is short, so the end part is not objectively too long.)

Overall, this book is enjoyable for its animal sections, and an example of a genre that's largely gone; its late entry into that genre, coupled with the somewhat jumbled human sections about poaching and environmental protection, might also point to what happened as animal life stories were, for better or for worse, replaced by more actively environmentalist minded novels. Worth checking out if you like "realistic" animal novels.
 

GNTLGNT

The idiot is IN
Jun 15, 2007
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