She stared at him, her gaze a kind of cage, throwing down bars to the lawn to keep him trapped. One moment of inattention, and he would be free. [p. 7]
Mary, who lives in East London, has recently split up with her abusive fiancé Mark: she's kept the house, and has a comfortable life with little excitement or social contact. Her next-door neighbours, Michelle and Eric, have a new baby named Flora, to whom Mary is drawn. But she's also fascinated by the dog fox who frequents her garden.
Gradually, as her life outside the house diminishes (signed off sick from her stressful job, more or less disconnected from her mother) she begins to form a kind of relationship with the fox. 'He was her friend. He alone knew that she was not so strange.' He comes into her house, he brings her presents -- boxer shorts, an egg, a shoe, a glove -- and she tries to name him (Sunset? Darcy? Red?) without success. '...he really wasn’t hers to name.'
It's soon obvious that Mary is not only introverted, but possibly losing her grip on reality. On the other hand, the fox is very real, and some of the novel is narrated from his viewpoint. His pregnant mate was killed by a car last autumn: now, in an urban summer, he forms a definite bond with 'human Female' and mistrusts Mark when he reappears at Michelle and Eric's barbeque. ('Salty snail odour tunnelled into his muzzle. From the fresh male who was an old male who was a slithery male...Come fresh to stalk around the human Female with sly feet and rippety eyes. Spruckling toadsome.')
Mary's slide into insanity -- taping up the front door; obsessing about Flora and the need to teach her Mary's own, new-found, love of the natural world; basically abandoning her job -- was uncomfortable to read, but her joy in the fox was a delight. It's hard to tell, though, how much of what happens on the page is real in any objective sense. For instance, it becomes clear fairly late in the novel that the 'abusive' Mark may have been a victim of Mary's own violent impulses. (He's still unpleasant, though.) Mary isn't the only character with psychological issues: Michelle is clearly suffering from post-natal depression. When Flora briefly goes missing, it triggers some unpleasant scenes.
Despite the anguish, the psychological issues and the tensions, I liked this novel a great deal, especially the fox-viewpoint passages and Mary's bliss in the natural world. How to be Human is a twisty novel, and while Mary is not a wholly likeable character, Cocozza's portrayal of her is a fascinating portrait of an unusual human.
...he bent one ear back \ to the human Female on the move through the ferns / one ear forward to the new noise. [p. 183]
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