Review: The Talking Beasts A Book of Fable Wisdom

The Talking Beasts A Book of Fable Wisdom by Kate Douglas Wiggin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A mixed bag, mostly not my bag.

It opens with the familiar Aesop's Fables, which most of us, I think, heard as children and which have given us a number of familiar expressions such as "sour grapes" and "dog in the manger". One of the fables includes a reference to spectacles, something that definitely didn't exist in the sixth century BC; apparently, fables continue to be added to the Aesop corpus even into modern times. A number of them are quite subversive, when you look at them closely, the kind of things you would expect a slave to come up with about villainous use of power by the powerful and its clever undermining by the supposedly powerless.

After that, things go downhill. The fables of Bidpai, which follow, are mostly rather contrived stories to make a predetermined moral, rather than being observations of semi-realistic and relatable behaviour and situations that generate their own insight, like Aesop's; and one of them literally has the moral "Don't associate with people of other races." Bidpai gets to this moral through a highly unlikely setup involving a frog and a mouse who tie a thread between them so that they can easily let each other know when they want to chat, and that results in both of them being caught when a predator grabs one of them. A number of them are the standard injunctions to keep to your place in life, though there are also a couple about oppressors getting their comeuppance in unlikely ways, the kind of thing that would keep an oppressed population compliant in the hope that external forces would deal with the oppressors, rather than encouraging them to take matters into their own hands.

Many of the subsequent fables appear to not have much point, or make a generic point quite weakly; some of them are trickster stories about a creature (like the mouse-deer that is the protagonist in many of the Malayan fables) who fools other creatures, without really making a point at all; some are overly wordy and repetitious. There's a lot of use of archaic language, for some reason; why would you publish a book for children in 1922 that has lines like "if thou wilt take it I will show it to thee that thou mayest do so"? It detracts rather than adds.

The Russian fables are most like Aesop's, in that they present a clear, applicable lesson that arises naturally out of the story, without pounding it into the ground.

I ran out of momentum when I hit the French fables of La Fontaine, translated into bad verse, and never made it all the way to the end.

Overall, the Aesop part is the best part (at least, as far as I read), and there are plenty of other places you can get that material. I'd hoped that a collection of fables drawn from all over the world would be like Aesop, but varied with some fresh new perspectives; it's mostly not like that, and there are some bad editorial decisions (like the archaic language). Not recommended.

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