Feed Them Silence

Feed Them Silence, Lee Mandelo

It’s some time in the near future, and an ambitious scientist, Sean, is on the verge of living out her dream. She’s finally found funding and a team to work on her project, a neural link with a wild wolf to really truly understand what they feel, think, and experience, their social structure and struggles. She’s painted this as key to understanding how they adapt to different conditions, and the wolf chosen for the experience is an adolescent female in a band that has only produced one pup in the past years as farmlands destroy their habitats and climate change make the seasons harder. As the experiment goes forward, though, Sean struggles to stay in control as her marriage falls apart, her experiences with the wolf start to get away with her, and the private funding she had to secure seems to have different aims for the project.

Let me just say that it is astounding what Lee Mandelo has been able to pack into a few short pages. The book is really a novella, clocking in at just over 100 pages. I usually find this an awkward length for a book. It’s longer than a short story, so I want more than a sketch, I want to know who I’m reading about and what their world is. But it’s still pretty short, so that’s not a lot of pages to truly paint a picture and tell a story. I find I often end up wanting more with a super short book like this. Not here, though. The world we were in felt fully realized. The different threads of the story were so well explored with such a short time. I understood Sean and her wife, Riya, and their troubles, understood the disintegrating marriage. I knew what challenges the wolves were facing and felt that I also experienced their world. I got the challenges with the funder, and of Sean trying to hold it together. The other characters were barely touched on but it was enough to get a sense of the team. This was easy to read but really quite dense when you see what it included. Kudos to Mandelo for that, truly.

The story itself unfolds in both expected and unexpected directions. As someone else in my book group put it, you knew vaguely where the story had to go, but it surprised with how it got there. And the story is original enough, exploring the mind of a wolf and letting the edges of wolf experience bleed in to real life, that one didn’t know exactly what was going to happen next. It keeps the reader on edge even more with the characters being ethically ambiguous. In a tight 112 pages that touches on gender relations, capitalism, academia, colonialization, othering, conservation, and climate change no character is the hero and no character is the villain. The story avoids broad brushes and easy redemption and let’s poor choices and good intentions hang uncomfortably, but never overshadowing the story.

In the end, it’s hard to sum up the book, and there are plenty of questions of what the book truly meant. But it provided a lot of fodder for my book club, it kept me involved the whole time, and it will definitely stick with me for a long while. An impressive piece of work.