Over the past few years, non-human narrators have cropped up repeatedly in experimental fiction. There was the slowly decaying protagonist of Emma Glass’s Peach and, most recently, in Maddie Mortimer’s Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, the villainous voice of cancer spreading through a woman’s body, charting its journey with exquisite, sometimes menacing, lyricism.
In Virginia-born Henry Hoke’s fifth book, Open Throat, Los Angeles’ much-adored mountain lion P-22 (so-called because it was the 22nd puma in a national park service study) gets this literary treatment. “I’ve never eaten a person but today I might,” begins the big cat’s account of the comings and goings in Griffith Park in the Hollywood Hills, where the late P-22 roamed. The person to prompt this change of dietary preference (described as “the man with the whip”) is first encountered dressed as a cowboy, engaged in some kind of illicit sexual activity. He only appears on three occasions in the novel, but unwittingly becomes the feline’s long-running nemesis, a symbol of everything wrong with humanity.
“I try to understand people but they make it hard,” the puma insists. His roving portrait of LA attempts to make sense of the incomprehensibility of human behaviour; snatches of overheard conversation piece together an incomplete picture of a politically split, inequality-riddled “scare city”. The first half of the book is sparsely plotted, but swarms with “nonstop” hiker chit-chat, ranging from the trivial (“I thought I was totally over brunch but I guess I’m not”) to the bizarre (“all we’ve got here is gurus”).
Set down in verse-like, relentless prose, the lion’s own voice is guileless, almost childlike, reflecting his own unfamiliarity with the world. Far from just a prowling outsider, he is “looking for the words”, his proximity to human life goading him into dialogue with it. Relying on the water pump at the park’s homeless encampment, he wants to “thank my people, but I know if they see me it’ll fuck up our relationship”. When the whip-wielder returns and sets the tents and the whole park ablaze, displacing the puma, the line between human and animal is ruptured. Later, in a surreal turn of events (and straying far from P-22’s true story), the lion becomes a young woman’s “emotional support goddess”.
Hoke’s choice of narrator results in some fang-sharp incisiveness and flashes of brilliant humour. Listening to passersby talking about therapy, the lion muses: “If feeling hungry is bad then I almost always feel bad / A therapist can help me with this.” He dreams of living where shrinks are as plentiful as “deer”, catching one to “store it somewhere safe and visit it once a week”.
But this lion’s-eye view is limited. After the animal watches two men have sex in his cave (“my purr echoes”), Open Throat touches on his backstory through a memory of his “kill sharer” – or lion lover – and how they would “bloody our faces together”. But this queerness is broached once, then forgotten.
Ultimately, the book claws at themes without pinning any down. Climate catastrophe looms large but is never explored. Humankind’s infringement upon nature is more interesting. As the lion lurches between near starvation and human comfort, Open Throat shows how an animal’s fortunes can hinge on humanity and make creatures more like us. It’s just a shame that, constrained by his narrator, Hoke’s vast terrain isn’t fully explored.
• Open Throat by Henry Hoke is published by Picador (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
