The Butterfly Lions

 

Rumer Godden The Butterfly Lions (1977)
I'm aware that my writing about The Butterfly Lions may represent a new extreme in terms of the thematic gap separating it from, off the top of my head, Asimov's robot tales, but you'll just have to deal with it. I've read it, I've formed opinions, and so here they are.

My mother had - and indeed still has - this book, which I vividly recall from my childhood - vividly recall here meaning that I was aware of its existence rather than that I read it, or even necessarily looked at the pictures. It's approximately a history of the Pekingese, and we had Pekingeses. My wife bought this copy for me as a father's day present, because I'm father to a load of cats, and because the Pekingese remains my favourite dog by some margin even though we don't have one. She didn't realise I already knew of the book so that was a nice surprise.

Rumer Godden is probably best remembered as having written the novel Black Narcissus, amongst other things. I discovered this when checking online to see whether she'd actually written anything else ever - which seemed doubtful given the slightly uneven quality of composition and peculiarly clumsy sentences such as:

The Chinese did not encourage wild flowers and in cultivating them went to extremes.

To lay my cards on the table, I'm a big fan of the Pekingese, or at least I've never met a Pekingese I didn't like; but I try not to think about dog breeders or their pseudo-eugenic notions of pedigree perfection. On this score, Godden proposes that the Pekingese may be the world's oldest pedigree breed, at least implying a large, relatively healthy gene pool in relation to more recently emerged breeds; and also that sturdiness was a priority for Pekingese breeders, at least when this written, with the modern Peke being a distinctly more robust pooch than those which first arrived in Victorian England; so hopefully such claims are true rather than wishful, defensive thing.

Much of the book compares the parallel lives of Queen Victoria and, her contemporary, the Chinese Empress Tzŭ-Hsi as well as the worlds they inhabited by virtue of the first English Pekingese being one named Lootie, presented to the former by military types following skirmishes with and looting of the latter. Victoria was apparently very fond of Lootie and had the little dog's portrait painted, despite which Lootie ended up in an unmarked grave where many of Victoria's other dogs had headstones featuring sculpted portraits of themselves. Furthermore:

All through these years, Queen Victoria seems to have remained almost in ignorance of her opposite Empress; perhaps her imagination, not at any time a vivid one, could not have stretched so far.

All of which begs the question as to why Godden spent so much time comparing the lives of the two given that few of the parallels drawn are even concerned with their respective dogs. Being generally ambivalent, or at least consistently unmoved by much Chinese culture, I therefore didn't really see the point of much of Godden's argument - whatever the hell it may be - beyond a few interesting details scattered here and there. When writing about the Pekingese, she's interesting, even charming, but such passages are in an unfortunate minority. It's nevertheless nice to have a copy of this, but not so much for the sake of the text.