“So a cow, a turkey and a Jewish pig walk onto an airplane…” If this sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, you wouldn’t be half wrong, though it’s actually the basis of Holy Cow, a novel by actor David Duchovny (X-Files, Californication).
Elise Bovary is the narrator of Holy Cow (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), this satirical take on vegetarianism and the Middle East. Elise is a cow on a free-ranging farm. She is perfectly happy and content with her life, until one day she happens to peer into the farmhouse to see the farmer’s family watching a documentary about meat farming on television (a.k.a., “the Box God”).
This epiphany – that humans eat cows – shatters her oblivious existence, and she begins plotting her escape. She learns that in India, cows are sacred, so she sets her sights on getting there.
She teams up with an equally anxious turkey – starving itself before the “Thanksgiving holocaust” so it won’t be eaten – who is determined to flee to Turkey (surely they can’t eat turkeys in a country named after the bird) and a Torah-inspired pig who wants to flee to Israel where, though pigs are reviled rather than sacred, are, like cows in India, also not eaten.
Like the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the animals in Holy Cow stand on two legs and pretend to be human. Toting passports and an iPhone, they get to the airport (the pig stops at a mohel along the way and changes his name to Shalom) and board a plane.
Some of the book’s jokes start to wear thin by this point (Hungry and Turkey jokes were hilarious when I was in Grade 2), but other times they’re smile-, if not cringe-worthy, particularly, when Shalom breaks out in Yiddish. “You meshugginer putz! Of all the ferkakta bird-brained schemes, you lousy shmendrick…”
The trio arrive in Israel, after a stopover in Turkey, and wind up behind the security fence in a Palestinian area.
At this point, Duchovny veers away from his pro-vegetarianism polemic and wanders into political territory.
“The Israelis built this giant wall to keep Palestinian Arabs out of disputed lands they were claiming for themselves. It reminded me of the fences back on the farm that were meant to keep us animals in our place. There is something in man that loves a wall, but what wall menders and fence builders do not get is that when they fence something out, they are also fencing themselves in. Not one but two prisons are made by one wall… We bovines have a saying you folks might adopt – ‘Some black, some white, some black and white, some roan, all cows.’”
Somehow, the animals’ misadventures bring Arabs and Jews together.
Though Duchovny explains, rather needlessly, at the end of the book that certain aspects of the novel – like animals boarding planes – are implausible, and thus the reader shouldn’t be bothered by them, it’s not so much those things that trouble me.
I can allow myself to believe that animals are able to wander around and pass themselves off as human. But for a cow to constantly refer to human pop culture (and the book is full of it) yet seem totally unaware of the television is somewhat lazy. Even in fantasy, or children’s books (which this isn’t), one expects consistency, or at least for the embellishments to make sense in the world the author creates.
Granted, that’s nitpicking. Holy Cow is an easy and fun enough read, though it’s unlikely to be taught in schools – a la Animal Farm – any time soon.