Natural History

‘A masterpiece . . . seductively readable . . . dangerous’
Daily Telegraph

‘Neil Cross is an astonishing writer – tautly lyrical, and able at a stroke to fill you with cold, dark fear’
Time Out

‘Dark and densely plotted . . . the plot reaches a violent climax, challenging notions of guilt and the limits of parental responsibility’
Daily Mail

‘The sudden violence of his denouement is long anticipated but unexpected in its visceral details. Both fierce and poignant in wrapping up the habitat and hunting themes, it poses uncomfortable questions about personal and family responsibility’
Sunday Telegraph

‘Neil Cross builds the tension in this fiendishly taut novel . . . As events mount to a genuinely shocking climax, Cross asks uncomfortable questions about the differences between being human and having humanity’
Metro

‘Intelligent, brilliantly written, fascinating . . . the exquisite tension that Cross’s sharp, devastating prose builds leads to a climax so shocking it will leave you flabbergasted’
The Crack

‘Cross is an astonishing writer – tautly lyrical, and able at a stroke to fill you with cold, dark fear of the malignant forces at large in the world . . . its horrible climax will stay with you for a long time’
Time Out

‘There are moment during Neil Cross’s fifth novel when the sense of foreboding is so strong that you half expect to find cobwebs between the pages . . . The expertly delivered shocks may stay with you for a few days, but there’s something meatier and more fetid hidden that will walk behind you for considerably longer’
The Times

‘Blurring the line between human and animal sympathies, this is written with such authenticity you can practically smell the chimp excrement’
Arena

‘Highly recommended’
Literary Review

‘Powerfully intelligent . . . serious and compelling in equal measure’
Guardian

 

 

It was only a dead ape. Patrick had seen dozens, one way or another. He’d seen them die normally, of old age or disease – and heard the war-shrieks as they murdered each other. He’d watched them cannibalize their young.

After Heartland, my friend (and then publisher) Tim Binding said to me: No more thrillers for a while. Push yourself.

So I pushed myself.

My idea was to do a kind of English John Irving novel; big and rambling and full of incident. In the end, it turned out to be quite the opposite — full of incident, but quite short and structured. Getting from that rambling, rough idea to the compact, multi-layered final draft was the cause of some grief.

I knew the story would centre on a chimp sanctuary. I knew the setting, the characters, the themes….but not the plot, not quite. So I chose a day to start — January 2nd, 2005. On that day, I sat down and went to Google News to run a search on ‘zoo’.  The most recent zoo-related story involved the mysterious poisoning of some animals in, I think, Brazil. Which gave me my starting point.

The rest of it, I made up as I went along…and it span out of control. After nine months (which is longer than it took to complete Heartland), I scrapped 100,000 words and pretty much started again.

It was too vast, too uncontrolled — and too researched. You do all that research, you damn well don’t want to waste it. You want to put it all in, making the novel read like a series of links between essays. I spent weeks killing darlings — binning vast, polished chunks of educational narrative with a piteous sigh.

I finished Natural History eighteen months after starting. Thinking about it, I suppose that’s not so bad — especially because by now I was also busy writing for TV. But it felt longer.

The end result looks nicely constructed, easily the most deftly put-together of my novels. But really there was nothing deft about it; not in the beginning, anyway. Having finally reached the end of the first clean draft, I cut the whole thing up into individual scenes and spent a good two weeks just moving them around like index cards, finding the right order.

The result is both the most layered and the most chaotic thing I’ve ever written. It’s also far better than anything I’d previously believed myself capable of writing. So Tim was right.

UK Publication: Simon & Schuster (August 2007)

US Edition: Open Road Media (December 2014)