LUCY AND BONBON

A Canadian woman gives birth to a human-ape hybrid in LePan’s novel.

Lucy Gerson was raised in the working-class community of Comber, Ontario. After an engagement ends in heartache, the 20-something woman decides to use money that she inherited from a wealthy uncle and visit her anthropologist sister, Susie, who lives far away in Congo. Lucy becomes fascinated by the bonzees that Susie is studying—a fictionalspecies of great ape that’s similar to a chimpanzee. Her fascination grows into something more when the wine-drunk woman has a sexual encounter, initiated by one of the apes in the jungle. Afterward, Lucy is pregnant, and after some difficult consideration about what to do, she eventually gives birth to a half-human, half-bonzee son named Bonbon. The new arrival is immediately a tabloid sensation; some people think he’s a miracle, others an abomination, and still others a rare opportunity for scientific study. What’s clear, however, is that many are undecided about whether Bonbon should be considered human. After being declared an animal by the Canadian courts, Bonbon is placed in the care of the Toronto Zoo, although Lucy lives nearby and attempts to raise him as best she can. While she battles with scientists—and herself—over the extent to which she has a right to her child, the maturing Bonbon must decide how he fits into the strange world around him.

LePan tells his story as a series of recorded statements given by the various characters—Lucy, Susie, Bonbon, and relevant researchers—who offer differing takes on the events of the novel. The work displays a great deal of control on the sentence level and adeptly presents a number of distinct voices along the way. Lucy is the main narrator, and the author provides her with a blue-collar vernacular that tends to occasionally drift into caricature. Here, for instance, she discusses her hometown of Comber: “that’s where we lived all the time we were growing up, ’cept for the year when I was five, that was when Dad ‘tried his luck’ in Montreal, but it turned out there wasn’t no luck there for him neither.” Despite the novel’s outlandish premise and broadly drawn protagonist, it isn’t really a comedy. Indeed, it attempts to work through the morality of the story with unexpected earnestness, and Bonbon’s lyrical idiolect is deployed for emotional impact: “My most long ago I member, it was to play on swing bars. And ropes, on the ropes. To swing to jump to laugh with Only, most little bonzee, and with Ever, bit bigger bonzee.” Even so, the novel doesn’t quite succeed as a Frankenstein-ish meditation on what makes someone human, either. The tone is slightly too odd, and the depiction of Lucy, in particular, borders too often on exploitative. These choices do seem to be intentional on the author’s part—at one point, Lucy even condemns readers for their condescending view of her—but they still leave an unpleasant aftertaste.

A surprising but ultimately unpersuasive novel about the human animal.