Cows

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Matthew Stokoe has written a novel like no other I've ever read--appalling, funny, and possessed of a sense of outre violence that makes Joris-Karl Huysmans read like Louisa May Alcott. It says things about rebellion, oppression, and corruption with such originality—I was laughing, cringing, and recoiling in disgust simultaneously.

We in Western society are so numb to violence, so used to being lied to in our media, so used to extremes in our entertainment, that we behave as those living in war-torn nations. He reaches a point where he’ll do anything to get that happy life and that’s when the madness that this book is famous for begins. She will mention a particular cow, and then go on to talk about another one from another line, before coming back to the original cow pages later.I think that to make headway on this problem of extreme subject matter (or images) it is necessary to distinguish these, and probably others, and consider them one by one.

I did like the sense of anthropomorphism which Young lent to her cows, and I do feel as though I learnt quite a few things about the intelligence and empathy of cows - for example, the grieving process which they go through when a member of their herd dies or is taken away, and the way in which poorly cows only want to eat willow bark for its aspirin properties. It is only when they have left the climate controlled atmosphere that they realise quite how big they are. Grading on the scale of blood, guts, bodily fluids and perversions that would make the Marquis De Sade himself blush, I can safely say that it makes the likes of “Pretty Girls” and “The Troop” look like middle grade books.

Maybe it’s from being a clinician in my real life who deals with amputation and open ulcers frequently, or maybe it’s from having a four year old and a dog and dealing with their messes, I found it was more of a metaphor for the characters lives that Stokoe used those elements. Unlike other reviewers, I see this not so much as being saccharine cute or attempting to put human mentalities onto non-human animals but rather. It’s a book about abuse, absence of love, and what happens when a person is driven to the point of losing their sanity.

One last piece of advice: If someone talks to you about this book and tells you it did not shock them or it wasn’t all that rough, don’t ever speak to them again. And if we examine it, if we can bear to hold it up to ourselves and acknowledge it as our own, then it makes us more than men. Alas despite the decent treatment and freedom these creatures get, they still end up being butchered. This is satire - this book is one big satire that each person who reads it will come out with a different message from the person next to them. Artists who have tried such experiments have sometimes found they need to work hard to aestheticize the difficult images: Andres Serrano’s beautiful, nearly abstract morgue photographs are an example, and so are some of Joel-Peter Witkin’s elaborately staged, faux-antique photographs of people with various medical conditions.There were a few sections I liked but on the whole it felt incoherent and badly put together, the 'plot' or thoughts darting about all over the place. When Steven gets a job at the local slaughterhouse, a door is unlocked in his brain and he begins to find the pieces he needs to put the puzzle together towards the ideal life he so desperately craves. They are always part of a herd, and the herd is led by the biggest, probably oldest, female, never the bull. For a contemporary artist it shouldn’t necessarily matter that the resulting artwork is harmonious—the purpose of choosing strong images, after all, is seldom to produce a pleasing or harmonious effect—but somehow it does.