The Origins of The Bestiary by Nicholas Christopher

It is usually difficult to trace the inspiration behind a novel. Like any author looking back, I might reconstrue—might even have forgotten—the elements that impelled me to write the book. Yet I have a clear picture of the evolution of The Bestiary. From the first, I was aware of the crucial elements that fueled the storytelling: my curiosity about the hidden metamorphoses, and accompanying projections, that are the essence of a man’s life; my love of animals, and my anger at the way they are treated in nearly every human society; my horror over the accelerating rate of animal extinction; the importance each of us assigns to the things we lose—people, places, things—and the illusions that enable us to endure those losses; my passion for mythology and mystery, and my fascination with the hazy borderline between history and myth.

Two particular myths lie at the heart of The Bestiary. I encountered them thirty years apart, and know now that only the combination of the two could have set in motion the creation of this book. They were like a chemical reaction waiting to happen.

The first is a Native American myth that altered the way I looked at life, and which I incorporated whole into the body of the novel. We hear it early on from the grandmother of the hero, Xeno Atlas, a woman with a gift for communicating with animals: “Before men started their killing ways,” she tells Xeno, “they spoke the same language as all the other animals. There were no boundaries between them. Then the worm of cruelty burrowed into man’s heart. The animals needed to protect themselves, so they made up their own languages that only their own kind could understand. The same thing happened when men started killing other men. Everyone felt safer talking their own language. They still do.”

The second myth was central to the cosmogony of the Gnostics, those early Christian heretics. It stipulated that the Holy Ghost authored two books: the Bible and the lost Book of Life, which was the first bestiary. The man who read both books in their entirety would achieve universal gnosis, ensuring the salvation and immortality of the soul. Accomplishing this would be difficult for many reasons, not least of which the fact that, for the Gnostics, the true Bible included the Apocrypha—for example, the secret Gospels of Thomas and Philip and the Book of Jubilees—and a host of other “lost” texts that have still not been recovered.

It occurred to me that, by this standard, a truly complete bestiary must include, not just the 16,000 animals on Noah’s ark, including those chronicled in the first bestiary (called the Physiologos) and all the fragmented bestiaries it spawned, but also the hundreds of creatures who were refused passage on the ark (griffins, manticores, basilisks, hippogriffs, perytons, rukhs) and had to survive the Great Flood and make their way through history, right up to the present day, by way of the human imagination.

These are animals whose images continue to appear all around us: gorgons and gargoyles, nagas and centaurs, the phoenix and the chimera. They dwell in all parts of the world, and are depicted in every medium—paint, marble, bronze—in both secular and sacred settings. But their touchstone remains the human imagination, where they can be found at all times; so long as there are men walking the earth, these animals will flourish. I thought they must certainly have their own book, which would be the earliest offshoot of the original Book of Life. I called it the Caravan Bestiary. It is a lost book, which must be reintegrated into the Book of Life, just as the complete Apocrypha must be appended to the Bible, and read in its entirety by anyone who would attain supreme gnosis. Or as another of my characters, a teacher who changes the course of Xeno’s life, explains to him: “The complete Bible and the intact original bestiary comprise a universal history which is, in fact, the only true history of the world; if read in tandem, in their entirety, they would offer up the same knowledge a man could otherwise acquire only by reading all the other books ever written—something akin to encountering a parallel universe, in which the rarest substances, and subtlest connections, have been restored, in which all that is inexplicable has come clear, and all that is unknowable is within our grasp.”

A poor boy from the Bronx who lost his mother at birth and barely knows his father, a chronically absent seaman, Xeno undertakes a passionate quest for the Caravan Bestiary, a book lost for eight centuries that captured his imagination when he was still in his teens. Eventually this quest dovetails with his search for the key to his own fractured family history. My novel is built around the mysteries of Xeno’s life, in which the dynamics of his two quests run along closely parallel tracks and, inevitably—magically—converge.

April 2007
New York City

• The Authors Official Webpage
• The Bestiary @ Amazon.com
• Authors Bio
• Essay by the Author on the Origins of the book