Book review: The Philosopher and the Wolf, by Mark Rowlands

Published on Friday 5 December 2008 16:24

Granta, £15.99

IF YOU have plans to live with a wolf, (or even several), this book comes highly recommended. It gives top tips on training and feeding, how to travel with your wolf, and how to take exercise together, outdoors and in. It is also a guide to finding and loving your inner-wolf. For that primal howl which we as humans may have forsaken lies deep within us, awaiting the call to resurrection.

Popular philosopher Mark Rowlands was a bachelor when he paid $500 for Brenin the wolf cub, and strode hand in paw with his chosen companion towards a future of brotherly love. If Brenin was king (a direct translation from the Welsh) then Rowlands was god, dishing out the commandments, expecting the wolf to tread in his path.

Brenin faithfully came to lectures, slept near his master, travelled on ferry boats, moving from sultry Alabama when Rowlands' life took them both to Ireland. He adapted. Eleven years later, in France, Brenin died, leaving a wolf-sized space in Rowlands' life. This book is a memorial to Brenin who, as Rowland's notes at the start, is "a brooding presence" throughout the book.

That presence stirs the book's concerns, which are philosophical ones, to do with our moral nature, moral choices, what makes us civilised, different from all the other beasts (except for the ape whose flair for deceitfulness, Rowlands argues, we have honed). The book also deals with the nature of happiness and of time (wolves being happy in the moment, humans driven instead towards the concept of future happiness, missing that which is momentous).

Outsiders together, then, roaming the continents, Rowlands and Brenin, (along with Nina and Tess, two later acquisitions to the pack), cut a dramatic, sometimes outlandish, but always riveting swathe through the text. Rowlands' clarity of thought and his honesty (often portraying his own misdeeds), are what make one's hitching a ride on this journey a mostly intriguing and seamless ride. Brenin's ghost is palpably present, at times deeply moving. "This is my attempt to speak for the wolf," Rowlands wrote in chapter one. He has written the howl.