I know not what will become of her, but I hope that her punishment will be light. For who can condemn a person for deceiving others who were so willing to deceive themselves? Which of us does not have a devil that lives inside of us, whispering not what is true, but what we wish to believe, out of innocence or cupidity or a hundred other reasons? We must stay ever vigilant against that demon, ever on watch against his pleasing music - if the tale of Mary Toft has any moral at all, it is this.

Writing a novel around the 18th Century historical case of Mary Toft, hoaxer and alleged birther of rabbits, Palmer has written a timeless examination of human nature, and an outstanding literary achievement.

Palmer sets out his intentions in the first pages, where we see provincial physician John Howard struggling to read English philosopher John Locke’s masterpiece “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” Palmer’s going to be concerned, while writing an entertaining story, with the question of ‘How do humans come to understand what they regard as truth?’ Is truth an objective reality, existing outside of the human mind, not subject to the realm of human passions? Or is truth an agreed upon conjecture shared between human minds, and thus changeable, and malleable, and open to manipulation by forces that do not mean well? “I am led to consider that the latter possibility may be the case,” says Howard, “that our world has some secret horror that I cannot fathom if so, controlling the minds of men though it is impossible to perceive with our senses alone.”

But to quote Leonard Cohen, you want it darker. So Palmer retells the fable of the king and the invisible cloak but changes the ending; no longer is the king exposed by the solitary truth teller, enabling the crowd to admit and see the truth for themselves. In this telling, a father brings his young son out to see the procession and when the king passes by and his son utters the infamous line "but he's naked", the father knows what he must do - break his son's neck, thus sacrificing what should be most dear to him to protect his, and the crowd's, illusions. After murdering his son as the king's procession stops in shock at the child's words, the father feels no shame, no guilt. On the contrary:

"The tradesman looked up at the king again, and the monarch smiled down at the tradesman with pleasure. And the robe the king wore had become, somehow, even more dazzling: its fabric had manifested as a rippling mirror, which reflected the tradesman back to himself as what he imagined himself to be, and as he once was, and as he would become. For a brief moment the tradesman had experienced what one might call a vision, some sort of devilish illusion, the details of the matter too embarrassing to repeat; but that cursed vision was gone now, and the hurrahs of the crowd grew ever louder and more frenzied as the team of horses pulled the king's wagon onward."

I mean, that is dark.

Who can dismiss that fear, reading human history or just looking around oneself? Palmer somewhat lessens the bleakness of this appraisal by writing with great humanity and empathy for his characters: the hoaxers, the educated dupes, the uneducated dupes the educated ones look down on, the ones who take advantage where they can. Everyone perhaps but the rich elite, represented here as utterly amoral Lords whose wealth warps their characters and destroys their humanity.

Philosophy and literary fiction make excellent bedfellows in skilled hands like Palmer’s. ( )

In 1726, in a small town in England, a physician is called to the bedside of a woman who is giving birth... to a rabbit. A dead rabbit. A dead, grotesquely dismembered rabbit. What could possibly be going on here? Is it the greatest medical discovery of the ages? A miracle sent by God? Something the woman must have brought on herself, somehow, with her thoughts or her actions? Those are the only reasonable possibilities, right?

Bizarrely, this is actually based on a true story. Although "true story" may be something of a slippery concept, and that is in fact the main theme of the novel: the ways in which human beings convince ourselves to believe things that may not be true, the ways those beliefs can take on an independent reality of their own once they're at large in the world, and the ways in which people with the power to do so project and impose those beliefs onto the lives and the bodies of others.

One might possibly complain that the novel ends up getting a bit heavy-handed with those themes, or that it seems to promise to be a very different kind of story at the beginning than the philosophical meditation it basically turns into. But for me, it worked quite well, and the ideas it's examining feel at once like universals of human experience and as if they've very, very specifically relevant to the world we're living in right this moment. ( )

This book--coupled with another I had read earlier this year, Bunny--led me to muse on rabbits, and how they are associated with the grotesque. There are not only these two novels, but the infamous rabbit-boiling scene in Fatal Attraction, and the human-sized rabbit in Donnie Darko, and probably some other examples I am forgetting. What is it about rabbits, associated as they are with innocence and cuteness, but also promiscuity and out-of-control breeding, that lends so well to horror? There's a whole essay there, probably, if I could be bothered to write it.

The rabbits in this story were not, strictly speaking, fictional, as this was based on a true story of a woman in 1726 rural England who suddenly began giving birth to rabbits, which convinced many people for a little while that she was miraculous. It's an interesting story, and Palmer dramatizes it well, but he also elevates it well above just a strange-but-true retelling. There is one chapter, midway through, written in Mary's voice, and it was there I realized that Palmer was really talking about the battle over ownership of women's bodies, particularly their reproductive organs, that is still ongoing:

"That need of his to occupy the space inside me, claim it as his own. ... The rule of men: all spaces must be filled."

The story of a woman giving birth to rabbits is truly an argument for bodily autonomy. And Palmer carries it further than just women's rights to own their own bodies, but extends that idea to everyone who has been dehumanized because their bodies do not conform to what is considered the norm. He populates his story with other freaks of the day, who nevertheless do not see themselves as freaks but as human: a woman with a facial birthmark, conjoined twins, a black man. In contrast, there are the idle rich who revel in the grotesque and the dehumanization of others, who dress themselves up ridiculously but see themselves as beautiful. This novel is all about how we perceive others and the reality we weave for ourselves as we tell ourselves the story of who we are and who everyone else is, and what is acceptable and what is freakish, and who has the rights of humanity and who does not. And also about how those perceptions can, and should, change--how we can rewrite our own story of our collective humanity.

When I got to the end, to the conversation that Mary's doctor, John Howard (a wonderfully drawn character) has with her alone about belief, about choosing what is true, and about what happens when God is brought into the room--it's amazing writing, and it gave me so much more to think about than I bargained for when I picked up this slim novel.

So far, I have read all three of Palmer's novels, and each one has surpassed the last. ( )

In early eighteenth-century England, a woman began to give birth to rabbits. This sounds like the premise for a very strange fantasy novel, but Dexter Palmer's novel is in fact based on historical events. Palmer has an eye for detail and for historical grotesqueries, and clearly did quite a deal of research in order to write Mary Toft; Or, the Rabbit Queen.

However, the novel never quite clicked for me. Palmer stressed the thematic parallels between past and present too much where a less didactic hand would often have served him better. And in the end, after all the blood and gore and the human fallibility, I'm not quite sure what the point of it all was.

(Neither, to be sure, is Mary Toft.) ( )

In Godalming in the reign of the first King William, a local surgeon is summoned to the home of a local couple and there delivers the woman, Mary Toft, of a rabbit. Mary claims to have dreamt that she was attacked by rabits and they became part of her, and every couple of days she gives birth to another rabbit. The Surgeon informs his peers in London and suddenly Godalming is overrun by the curious. Decaping to London, Mary becomes a sensation but also her strange births seem to stop.
This is a novelisation of a true story and Palmer has managed the truth and fiction incredibly well. He weaves together a story which contrasts the science of the day with the social zeitgeist. The motif of 'freak show' and the venality of society sits well alongside the tale of the naive country doctor and his apprentice. I particularly liked the way that Palmer has used the fable of 'The Emperor's New Clothes' as a device, taking it as a folk tale and using it as a mirror for the gullibility of the main protagonists. This is an impressive working of a sad little story ( )