Bear: Releasing Today

 

 

 

Bear (2024)

By Julia Phillips

Hogarth, 304 pages.

★★★★

 

“Snow-White and Rose-Red” is a German folk tale that’s not the same story as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” though it does involve a dwarf. Also a ferocious bear and two young girls. I mention this because author Julia Phillips draws upon it for her page-turning modern tale set on San Juan Island in Washington State.

 

Hold the dwarf, but Bear is likewise about a bruin, two sisters, and a single mother. From there, Phillips allows her imagination to roam to construct an alternative narrative. Sisters Elena and Sam have been so close for so long that it’s as if they share a brain stem. As they edge toward their thirties they discuss leaving the island, but not things that matter more. San Juan is a major tourist area–especially for spotting orcas–but with a permanent population of under 8,000 there are not a lot of opportunities for locals. The location reminded me of the contrast between coastal Maine and its interior. That is, the wealth is in the hands of summer residents and visitors to the coast whilst those providing services live further away and close to the margin.

 

Elena and Sam tend to their dying mother, her illness probably linked to chemicals she ingested at work. You can imagine how hard it is to hold such a household together. Elena is a bartender/waitress at a golf club and Sam on the ferry that is the only way on and off the island. Sam depends a lot on tips, as she works for a food vendor, not the state. (Read no benefits, low wages.) Elena is calm and organized, whereas Sam is restless, a loner, and so bored that she routinely has sex with a guy in which she’s only marginally interested.  

 

In one trip across the strait Sam spots an amazing phenomenon: a bear swimming beside the boat. That’s weird because there are no bears on any of the more than 170 islands in the San Juan archipelago. She’s pretty sure it’s a carnivorous grizzly, which would be more unusual still, as Washington has very few brown bears. When the bear is seen again outside their house, Madeline, a state wildlife official, assures Elena and Sam the animal is almost certainly a lost black bear. Her advice is the standard response: avoid the bear, secure all garbage, and don’t feed it as a fed bear is ultimately a dead bear.

 

Madeline is wrong; it is a grizzly. Sam is terrified, but when Elena views it, she sees the glories of nature. Nor is she frightened by it; in her magical thinking, the bear is beautiful and a good luck talisman. Sam insists that Elena get rides to her job, advice routinely ignored as she enjoys walking in the woods. She’s not just fascinated with the bear, she’s obsessed by it. 

 

Bear is a metaphor for numerous things, including the secrets Elena and Sam keep from one another, the gap between the masks they wear and internal clashing aspirations, and the anguish of forging independent personalities. On a deeper level it’s a tale of freedom, civilization and wildness, and what we really see versus what we wish to see. Who is trapped? What boundaries should be obeyed and which ones ignored? What is the price of escape?

 

I zipped through this book in two sittings. Much of that is due to Phillips’ sparkling prose and her sense of knowing when to make the plot scurry and when to allow it to graze. It further engrosses if you allow yourself to embrace mythopoetic storytelling and remind yourself that even adapted folk tales have morals. In my view, those readers who have complained about its ending forget that Bear is a fantasy that relies on character types. There is no “real” Elena, Sam, or bear. But who among us has never felt trapped or had to wrestle with the dilemma of whether to embrace or flee?

 

Rob Weir