A reptile for all seasons

TIMOTHY or, Notes of an Abject Reptile. By Verlyn Klinkenborg. Alfred A. Knopf, €13

Most people are aware that land turtles live long lives, are inclined to hibernate, and move through the world at a slow pace. But few know that they have a strong preference for short sentences and like to place periods where humans might think to put commas. In Timothy; Or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, Verlyn Klinkenborg takes us into the mind of one such literate turtle. It was while reading the journals of the renowned 18th-century English naturalist Gilbert White, in which White's pet turtle plays a recurrent role, that Klinkenborg conceived of writing from the point of view of that turtle. To attempt to render nonhuman consciousness in human language is to enter into the raging debate over animal intelligence and to risk anthropomorphising, or worse, Disneyfying. But Klinkenborg, who writes editorials for the New York Times, shoves these worries aside. His turtle is an old-fashioned, near-omniscient narrator. As she( the turtle is a misnamed female, it turns out) tells the "true story" of her life, I found myself having a hard time suspending disbelief. But then slowly (as befits her kind) Timothy starts turning on the turtle charm. It soon becomes apparent that she is giving us a natural history not just of the always curious, often prying Gilbert White and of his home village of Selborne, but of the whole "restless tribe" of Homo sapiens.

Timothy describes humans as "great soft tottering beasts", vain creatures who can never quite manage to "quiet their humanness". About two-thirds of the way through this short book, there emerges a panoramic vision of man's fear and neediness, of our rushing to faith out of insecurity, our almost desperate insistence on our own uniqueness.

Criticising the anthropocentric through anthropomorphising remains an odd strategy, and I wish that Timothy had more often managed to quiet her own humanness. But when our turtle preacher really gets rolling, I feel almost ready to shout, "Amen".

DAVID GESSNER

David Gessner is the editor of the literary journal Ecotone and the author of five books, including Sick of Nature and The Prophet of Dry Hill

© 2006 The New York Times