Book Review: We Bought A Zoo by Benjamin Mee

Just a few short years ago, Benjamin Mee, a British journalist, was writing home repair columns for The Guardian and living a quiet rural life with his beautiful wife and two kids. So, of course, the next logical step anyone in this position would take would obviously be to…buy a zoo. Which is exactly what Benjamin Mee did.

In the hokily-titled We Bought A Zoo, Mee chronicles the adventures of his family as they negotiate, purchase, and revitalize a brokedown zoo in the English countryside. The story is certainly interesting enough, even if the points of the book’s subtitle – The Amazing True Story of a Young Family, a Broken Down Zoo, and the 200 Wild Animals That Change Their Lives Forever — aren’t fleshed out very successfully. Mee focuses his pen more upon the A Broken Down Zoo part, slightly less on the The Amazing True Story of a Young Family part, and, regrettably, even fewer pages on The 200 Wild Animals.

This kinda sucks because the wild animals were the original reason I was drawn to this book. Instead of having a tiger roaring gorgeously on the book’s cover, it would have been appropriate to have, say, a jackhammer jackhammering away at a slab of concrete, or a steamroller steamrolling a walkway. With the material for such a fantastic story at his fingertips, I was a little flabbergasted that Mee chose instead to illustrate, in often endless detail, the infrastructure problems of the zoo itself, or the icky-poo blankets of grease that covered the zoo restaurant. Like a bratty kid on a long car trip to the zoo, I kept whining, “When are we gonna get to the wild animals?”. There are plenty of stories about anesthtitizing big beasts to relocate them or get them medical care, but even these are done more as a chronicle of the zoo’s renovation than captivating peeks into the lives of wild animals. Sadly, apart from some quick references to a tapir that I would love to meet, and some really, really stupid peacocks, The 200 Wild Animals take a backseat to the bigger concerns of working loos and where to put the pasties stand.

Which brings me to the language. I consider myself well-read and well-traveled, but I struggled in several areas of this book to interpret what Mee was saying. Not because it’s badly written, but because it’s so British. A huge number of references and slang terms in the book were completely lost on me. I kept wishing for an English-to-English dictionary to help me out. I’ve also never in my life seen the word “myriad” used so many times in the course of one book. And there are way too many words in We Bought A Zoo as it is. Mee has a penchant for describing in finite detail some of the most useless and uninteresting information, and even with the useful and interesting, he still goes on for way too long. All in all, the book could stand to lose about 75 pages and still get its point across beautifully.

We Bought A Zoo is not a failure, though. Not by any means. Mee raises some important and enlightened issues about zoos, conservation, and animal husbandry (including a fascinating riff on homosexuality in animals). He also creates a memorable and unique cast of characters, including his 76-year-old mother, who decides to chuck it all and go in with her son on buying the zoo. Mee’s respect and adoration for her is palpable, and he paints his mum as a loving eccentric with a no-nonsense zest for life.

But the most moving aspects of the book come out of a series of events that no one — least of all Benjamin Mee — saw coming. Just after arriving at the zoo, Mee’s wife, Katherine, learns she has a brain tumor and, within a few months, passes away. He gives us a brave, abbreviated glimpse into what it was like during those months, dealing with the zoo — this new project that was now vastly less important — and nursing his young wife through her final days. Mee’s descriptions are full of love and admiration and are more than a little heartbreaking. But he does something truly classy here: he doesn’t turn We Bought A Zoo into a memoir of grief. Katherine’s death plays a big role in the book, obviously, but instead of going on for pages about his agony and loss, he uses it as an impetus to refocus on the work at hand: the work of the zoo. We see how his grief shapes his vision for this project, and he leaves the nakedly personal to himself. He also, very commendably, gives only a slight mention of his childrens’ reactions to their mother’s death. There’s no advertising of bereavement here; Mee and his kids work through their loss outside the pages of We Bought A Zoo. We know quite clearly what everyone is feeling and living through without a word being written about it; this is the mark of a truly good writer.

I only wish Mee included more of the — well, more of the zoo in We Bought A Zoo.  Grade C

 

Title  We Bought A Zoo: The Amazing True Story of a Young Family, a Broken Down Zoo, and the 200 Wild Animals That Change Their Lives Forever

Author  Benjamin Mee

Publisher  Weinstein Books

Year Published  2008

ISBN  1602860483

Snarkbytes  The story told in We Bought A Zoo was the subject of a popular BBC documentary entitled Ben’s Zoo.

September 29, 2008 | Filed Under Biography & Memoir 

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