Pepsi Bears and Other Stories

Anson Cameron

Pepsi Bears and Other Stories
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Random House Australia
Country
Australia
Published
1 August 2011
Pages
242
ISBN
9781864711721

Pepsi Bears and Other Stories

Anson Cameron

Daring and provocative short stories from one of Australia’s best comic writers.

Daring and provocative short stories from one of Australia’s best comic writers.

A collection of fables in which the intuition of animals is set against the hubris of man, Anson Cameron is part court jester, part acclaimed writer of short stories and novels, and part national conscience.

A cola company uses the last wild polar bears as billboards. A boy is forced to compose poems for ats. A dog starts a race-riot. A zebra shames two armies. A zoologist vivisects a gorilla to disprove evolution and has his own brain placed in the ape’s head. In New Guinea Zookeepers eat their exhibits. In Gippsland the face of The Lord appears on dairy cows. In the Western Desert mummified egg-bandits hang from trees…

By these incidents the Nature of Man is compellingly exposed. And the many and varied species of Mother Earth are wry spectators as Man pilots the planet he thinks he owns into the wall of oblivion.

What the critics say about Anson Cameron-

‘…one of the most interesting writers of his generation… has an imaginative largesse and sentence-by-sentence articulation that soars above the pack’ – Peter Craven, The Australian

‘…prose that fizzes with energy and humour, leaping from the scatalogical to the lyrical, from the earthy to the sublime’ – The Adelaide Advertiser

‘Cameron writes a tough, gutsy story that is so well crafted you know there’s someone behind the wheel from the word go’ – The Age

Review

Halfway through reading Pepsi Bears I had to put it down and figure out what it was about Anson Cameron’s writing that was so ridiculously infectious. Sure, it was witty, incisive and insightful, but that didn’t quite explain it. Then I realised it was the sheer delight this author takes in the act of storytelling. Not since reading Roald Dahl’s short stories as a teenager have I encountered a writer who so clearly revels in the form as Cameron.

By turns hilarious, macabre, heartbreaking, scatological and surreal, the stories in Pepsi Bears are principally concerned with the collision between humanity and the natural world. Zebras, dogs, polar bears, gorillas and an entire zoo-full of exotic animals conspire, with Cameron’s deft guidance, to unmask the absurdity of humankind in situations trivial and profound. But Cameron is a satirist with a keen sense of empathy, and he has the ability to turn comedy to poignancy in the flick of a single sentence. I finished the book with the strange sense of having undergone a deep searching examination of the human condition whilst watching a riot of clowns and circus animals set loose in a fairground.

I had only read Cameron’s stories in isolation before, and the snowball effect of reading a whole volume left me somewhat giddy. Short story collections are like novels at fever pitch, and it can be hard to judge individual stories in the initial onslaught. But after taking a deep breath and considering each one on its own terms, the only criticism I can offer is that of comparison: not all of them are quite so excellent as their companions. But this hardly seems fair, because if you open Pepsi Bears at random, chances are you’ll encounter one of the best short stories you’ll read this year.

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