This bizarre modern novel is narrated by various characters, and covers a time span from the recent past to far into the future. A fifteen-year-old New Yorker leaves on her own to find the Iowan father she has never met. He is less than welcoming but she stays and gradually falls in with a ragtag group of radicals, criminals, and animal rights activists. When she is the narrator, she resorts to comparing her real life with that which she imagines she would have had if she had stayed in New York.
A plot to free hundreds of thousands of layer hens housed in horrible conditions is slowly developed and deployed lead by ostensibly public inspectors and auditors of the massive factory farms, along with secret inside informers. Let’s just say that not everything goes as planned, all because of what happens in Barn 8. Conflicts between the conspirators and conflicts within farming families forms much of the story line.
There is an undercurrent of condemnation of amoral unfettered capitalism and selfish greed and the seemingly inevitable decline of the of the human race. Far into the future, the hens are doing fine while we have become extinct.
I have fond memories of dozens of free-range White Leghorns (neighbours raised Rhode Island Reds that lay brown eggs which we thought, perhaps with a subconscious racial bias, to be inferior). Ours were usually penned most of the year and climbed or flew into wooden nests lined with straw to lay their eggs. We went to gather eggs from these twice a day, 24/7. When she stopped laying eggs, the axe as guillotine awaited. Still I find it as easy as Unferth to believe that White Leghorns have individual personalities and communication skills and deserve better lives than they are ever afforded on modern factory farms.
The writing is precise and scenes are described vividly. The writer’s imagination is ingenious. One quote to illustrate this: “… outside the barn, insects were rubbing their instruments, tuning up, playing the preludes to millions of songs that sound to the human ear like the author-less plainchants, a chorus of Dark Age petitioners, though each cricket song contains variations that make it unique.”
In places, there appear some apparently disconnected bits that must have some deep literary significance that totally escapes me, such as the long question and answer section towards the end.
I can’t recall where I read the review that persuaded me to borrow this book, but I quite enjoyed it. I am quite sure my nephew, the owner of a huge chicken farm operation would not.
The Passionate Reader 