Title: All Creatures Great and Small
Author: James Herriot
Date: 1972
Publisher: Bantam / St Martin’s
ISBN: 0-553-10759-3
Length: 499 pages
Quote: “My mind went back to that picture in the obstetrics book...There was no dirt or blood or sweat anywhere.”
The author known as James Herriot earned his living as a veterinarian for years, but really made his fortune when he started writing about his animal patients and the humans who helped and hurt them. Although most of his readers no longer lived with cows and sheep, each book contained some instructive, and some merely poignant or funny, stories about dogs, cats, and horses too. Gruesome details about animals’ diseases are scattered sparsely amidst charming pictures of country landscapes and amusing pieces of human folly. Through the 1970s and 1980s these books were bestsellers.
Of course, some of the people mentioned in these stories were still living, so names and identifying details had to be fictionalized. This volume of a five-book series focusses on the quirks of Herriot’s first employer and co-worker, to whom he gives the names of Siegfried and Tristan Farnon and a story about parents who loved opera. Dr. Farnon and Dr. Herriot are young bachelors; Tristan is a student; the lady known to readers as Helen Alderson Herriot is a pretty, popular girl who can hardly fail to see the farcical side of the three guys’ mostly ridiculous dating lives, but eventually marries James Herriot...and gets a ridiculous honeymoon adventure, at least in the book, as her immediate reward. A theme that runs through the book is the image of an elderly man reflecting on how silly youth is. This image may have served as a drop of oil on the waters in 1972, when grandparents were often called upon to reduce the tensions between students and their parents. Helen is cast as the sensible straightman while Siegfried, Tristan, and James make fools of themselves as regularly as their contemporaries in the novels of P.G. Wodehouse.
All the names in these books, including the author's, are fiction; the author's real name was Wight. The events in the stories happened, but not necessarily in the same sequence, or involving the same people, as the books suggest. Herriot originally planned four long volumes, All Things Bright and Beautiful, All Creatures Great and Small, All Things Wise and Wonderful, and The Lord God Made Them All; later, by popular demand, he added a sequel entitled Every Living Thing. All are worth reading for pleasure, although the stories are fact-based fiction and the veterinary insights are a hundred years out of date.
Still, some information is evergreen. Instructive stories in All Creatures Great and Small feature a spoiled, overfed dog who nearly died from overeating but recovered his health when put on a reducing diet and treated like a dog, a sad sequence of cows who died because their humans never called the vet until it was too late, and a cow whose inflammation was actually cured by a devoted human who sat up bathing and massaging the cow all night. There are also warnings about the less obvious symptoms of tuberculosis in cattle and the postpartum “madness” in which mother animals can become dangerous. The birth process is draining even in animals, like cats, who give birth easily; brain chemicals can be unbalanced; animal mothers may attack their humans or, less often, their babies.
Although the stories fit together into a sequence with an overarching "story arc," each chapter can be considered an independent short story. If your leisure reading time is limited, no worries—all the books in this series are ideal for those who choose to read just one short chapter a day. Since the only aspect of these books that is less than tasteful is the inherent disgustingness of veterinary medicine, the books also provide what might be called good clean wholesome gross-outs for middle school readers.
This book is warmly recommended to anyone who has not already read it, with the warning that most people over age thirty probably have.
No comments:
Post a Comment