Ruminator III—This Time It's Personal

Review of author Denis Bostock's work in progress

It’s now been about two weeks since I finished my close reading of the manuscript of Ruminator III, and I can honestly say that the delightful and anarchic world created by author (and my friend) Denis Bostock continues to shimmer in my mind for several reasons: Bostock’s amazing ability to riff comically on simple absurdities of life and language; the loveable ensemble of characters; and the freewheeling storyline, which satirizes the conventions of social fiction and epic war, while at the same time profiting from the dramatic tensions vital to these spheres of fiction. All this is quite an achievement, especially considering that this is a novel told entirely from the perspective of a band of revolutionary dairy cows who decide one day to throw off the mantle of oppression and stand up—as it were—on their own four hooves.
Bostock’s comic style is readily apparent in the first section of book, which is probably an unrivaled compendium of bovine jokes and puns in the history of western literature. Bostock’s rare and splendid ability to play with words shows itself in the delightful coining of such phrases as “workcowship” for “workmanship,” “bovinity,” for “divinity,” and the phrase, “I felt as if I had butterflies in my stomachs.” At times, the author seems to be channeling the cartoony and conceptual humor of Eddie Izzard, such as when a cow pauses in her conversation to consider the light bulb that has just appeared above her head as an indication that she’s just had an idea. At other times, Bostock’s comedy is like that of Dave Barry during the prime of his Miami Herald humor column: the jokes are unrelenting and shamelessly silly, and half the fun comes from watching the author continue to outdo himself in search of mischievous nonsense.
But for all this silliness, the humor also serves the important purpose of giving the reader a welcome into the story of the dairy farm revolution. The message to the reader is, “I know this is ludicrous, and you know it’s ludicrous, so let’s sit down together and have as much fun as we can with it.” Again and again, we’re invited to laugh as the cows—guided by their leader Daisy a.k.a. Moo See Dung—are torn when forced to choose between overthrowing the unjust power structure of the ruling regime or just eating some grass and taking a nap. The wit and playfulness grows as thick and dense as grass in the first section of the book, and as a reader I was having so much fun a part of me wanted to stay forever in the meadow of absurdity and postpone the action of the plot indefinitely.
But the action does commence. Shortly after taking over the dairy farm, the farmhouse catches fire, and Moo See Dung has to rally her troops to action in a section that gives evidence to Bostock is able to weave humor into a fast-paced scene where a lot is going on. The cows are just barely able to avert the fire, but it still proves to be a pretty simple adversary compared to the problem of their mounting social and sexual frustration. You see, there’s only one bull in their pasture, Angus, and he happens to be a self-absorbed, useless oaf who throws all his energy into perfecting his James Bond impersonation and grooming himself as the world’s first bovine gangster rap star. Driven to despair, the cows send out a single scout, the impetuous Doris, into the world to search for more recruits to their band, and especially for bulls of a higher caliber.
This second section of the book centers on the family history of Moo See Dung née Daisy, her mother Florence, and her daughter Doris. As with any family drama, issues of character take center stage. We see all sorts of little subplots developing, romances between the cows and bulls who are brought in to visit, constant bickering between Moo See Dung and her mother, and Doris’ discovery of her long lost grandfather.
This section of the book ends with the great big wedding festival of Florence and her long lost love, who (a little confusingly) is also named Angus—Angus Senior. The story of the wedding festivities are enjoyable because by the time they occur I felt as a reader that I’d been drawn into the community on the dairy farm, that I cared about who they were and what happened to them. I would very much like to see this aspect of the book fleshed out even more: I’d like get a better idea of the differences between the cows, see more subplots, and be treated to more of the sort of idiosyncratic, slice-of-life humor that is at the heart of all romantic comedy from Jane Austen’s Emma to Forgetting Sarah Marshall. There’s already a lot there: we see the cows worrying about whether they look fat; we see the delight of the sexually frustrated cows when they discover that the washing machine can function as a huge vibrator. I think that Bostock has made a good start here, but has not quite realized the incredible comedic blank check he has written himself in the form of the first great bovine wedding comedy.
Still, by the time that the world of the dairy farm is threatened from the outside, we have a sense that there really is something at stake. The threat comes from the expansionist and imperialist despotism of the pig Bonaparte, a sort of update of Orwell’s despotic swine Napoleon from Animal Farm. Like the cows, Bonaparte has led a barnyard revolution, but he has turned his farm into a massive military-agricultural complex. He is surrounded by a tight coterie of animals, all of whom are not-so-subtle caricatures of despotic figures ranging from Pol Pot and Robert Mugabe to George W Bush and Tony Blair. Bonaparte and his gang has cast a covetous colonial eye on the rich (vegetable) oil reserves owned by Moo See Dung’s revolutionary collective. We’re introduced to Bonaparte’s farm by way of the intrepid cow Buttercup, who volunteers to infiltrate the encampment on the eve of Bonaparte’s impending invasion.
The narrative of Buttercup’s reconnaissance mission is probably the best piece of descriptive prose in the book. The innocent Buttercup is initiated into a nasty and brutish barnyard Gitmo where torture and wanton execution is the order of the day. Buttercup’s horror at what she sees helps to raise the stakes in preparation for the climactic battle scene wherein Bonaparte’s pigs bombard Moo See Dung’s dairy farm with rocks, bullets, flaming catapults and the corpses of conservative British politicians. The story of the battle is told at a fast clip that held my attention, and there are quite a few surprises, especially the transformation of Angus Junior from a useless wanker into a sort of bovine Achilles, putting his life on the line at the height of this barnyard Armageddon.
The story of Bonaparte’s invasion is clearly modeled on the 2003 invasion of Iraq and George W Bush’s “War on Terror,” and so it’s unfortunate that Bostock cheats himself of a fair bit of satiric sting by making the figures of George the bush kangaroo and Tony the toad relatively minor characters in Bonaparte’s army.
But the most important thing is that Bostock has presented in this manuscript the main ingredients of a story that, from start to finish, only he could create. The three main elements of conceptual comedy, ensemble family drama and satiric war epic all fit together in a novel and satisfying way. I think Bostock still needs to do some revision, blend the elements together a little more gracefully—for instance, there’s very little foreshadowing of the pigs’ invasion until the final third of the book—but he’s reached the crucial stage where the roadmap to such revision lies mostly in exploring and augmenting the strengths of the manuscript he’s already developed. I wish him luck in this endeavor, and very much look forward to seeing how the novel develops.