We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves: A Novel

Author: Karen Joy Fowler

Karen Joy Fowler isn't really a mainstream writer: she began writing science fiction, practically all of her short fiction is sf or fantasy, and she jointly founded the James Tiptree Award. Yet she isn't really a science fiction writer either: her novels are primarily mainstream, though there are unresolved suggestions of the fantastic in some of them, such as Sarah Canary or Wit's End. It is this ambiguous literary position that is at the heart of much of her best fiction, particularly this brilliant novel. We are All Completely Beside Ourselves is a straightforwardly mainstream story, but it is written with a science fiction sensibility that allows us to see twists that are not apparent on the surface of the novel. In an experiment in animal behaviour, a family raises a chimpanzee as part of the family, but when the youngest daughter is five (the same age as the chimp) unforeseen issues force the family to send the chimpanzee away. The girl, too young to understand what is going on, blames herself for the loss of her sister, and now, twenty years later when her eco-terrorist brother reappears in her life, all of these issues come to the surface. So far, so straightforward. But what makes this science fictional is that subtly, without ever drawing attention to what she is doing, Fowler makes us aware that not only did the chimp learn from her human sister, but the girl learned from her chimp sister, and much of her adult behaviour now is actually chimp behaviour. We are All Completely Beside Ourselves was shortlisted for several science fiction awards, so the science fictional elements of the book were recognised by a lot of readers. But you don't have to read it as science fiction to recognise that this is an extraordinarily powerful and moving book that makes us think again about human and animal behaviour.