I was first drawn to Bête by its beautiful cover. Let’s just take a second here to admire it. It is BEAUTIFUL. Secondly, it had a compelling premise. Bête takes place in a world where animal rights activists have given animals artificial intelligence and the ability to speak. Unfortunately, in my opinion, those two things are all this book really had going for it.
I have an odd habit of reading books whose main characters I don’t tend to like. I don’t know if that’s a character flaw on my part (being that I am picky about who I like or not) or if there is just a general trend for the books I enjoy to be inhabited by shitty people. You can probably guess from this introduction that the main character of Bête, a dude named Graham, is not very likeable. Since I continue to read the kinds of books that I do, it can be deduced that usually, likability or lack thereof is not typically a deterrent for me. But occasionally, it does become grating, which it did in this case. Graham was so very unlikable. He was so crotchety and embittered, and this book wasn’t written quite well enough for me to get okay with how unsavoury Graham was.
Graham spends a good chunk of the book in the woods, hunting occasionally, and starving mostly. It seems like a totally different book from the one you start off reading, in that it very quickly becomes a man-disappears-into-the-woods-to-figure-out-his-shit, Into-the-Wild kind of book. Luckily for me, Bête a pretty fast read, because I don’t think I could have held out for much longer. I found that there was way too much starving in the woods, or refueling in the woods, or being grumpy in the woods to suit my tastes.
Bte was also a bit all over the place. For a good hundred pages, the fact that animals could talk didn’t seem so relevant. They were sometimes mentioned, and often Graham thought about how much he hated them, but overall they didn’t feel so relevant. The writing style was too confusing, and it was broken up way too confusingly for me. The book, as a whole, just didn’t blend well together. Would not recommend.
But that damn cover. Unf.
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