The Hartlepool Monkey

In 1386, in a small town in Normandy, a pig was convicted of murder. It was duly executed in the market square, dressed in a man's jacket and breeches. The people of Europe have a long and ignoble history of punishing animals for their indiscretions, much of it recorded in EP Evans' classic book, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, which was first published in 1906.

Evans doesn't mention the curious, and possibly apocryphal, story of the monkey, who, at the time of the Napoleonic wars, was washed ashore from a ship wrecked off Hartlepool. The monkey was tortured and hanged on the beach because some local fishermen, unable to understand his gibbering, took him for a French spy. That story is the basis for Sean Longley's rollicking debut novel. But the basis is all it is.

One curious feature of the unfortunate Hartlepool business, and possibly the reason the monkey met his grisly fate, is that he was dressed in military-style uniform. Longley offers a fantastical explanation of how that came to be. Beginning in Africa, and then rampaging through revolutionary France and the England of mad King George, the book introduces a vivid cast of characters, including a pox-doctor, a 'one guinea brief' and a steel-eyed courtesan, interspersed with familiar historical figures such as the Scarlet Pimpernel and Admiral Lord Nelson (who meets a startling, and surely factitious, fate). The last section imagines the trial the monkey might have had, against a background of naked (occasionally all-too-naked) professional ambition and establishment perfidy.

As befits a story set at the culmination of the Enlightenment, this one has a philosophical theme. There is talk of Socrates, Plato, Descartes and John Locke, and the 'social contract' and the 'noble savage' loom large. The book treats of rationalism and the empiricism that would soon supplant it (and maybe suggests why the latter is superior to the former). Most of all, though, The Hartlepool Monkey is a wry, imaginative, breathless exploration of a question that has occupied thinkers from Thomas Aquinas to Pete Singer: what does it mean to be a person?

EP Evans' analysis suggests two reasons why animals were punished by men: first, to eliminate social dangers. That would explain the execution of the Normandy pig, which was rendered incapable of killing again. Second, for deterrence '“ not of pigs, of course, for none would be present when their fellow met his end. It was humans who were to be deterred by this spectacle: if mere animals could be treated so barbarously, what of rational beings?

Evans' pig, then, was simply the means to an end: he died pour encourager les autres. The crowning glory of Longley's marvellous tale, on the other hand, is that it regards its simian hero as an end in himself. It gives him a history and a name, and allows him to be treated not just like a man, but as if he werea man. And it makes the reader understand just why that was the proper course.