My Penguin Year: Life Among the Emperors
Written and Narrated By: Lindsay McCrae
Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
Okay okay writing’s not the best okay! -BUT- It has freaking penguins!!!
Yeh yeh yeh, the writing gets a bit clunky, our author Lindsay McCrae is more cinematographer than wordsmith, and I do wonder how his girlfriend/wife/mother-of-his-child, Becky, managed not to clobber him via Skype, but what can I say? I did sooo enjoy this!
First, HUZZAH for Chirpbooks! Without their Featured Deals, I would NOT have had the opportunity to give My Penguin Year a go (As it was, I juuuuust managed to get it under the wire before the sale expired!). Dunno why I waited so long as I was smitten with the cover from the get-go, but there you are: I’m a procrastinating slug.
Still, I didn’t for a moment put off listening to it, couldn’t wait to make it my Animals Pick for the week, esPECially as our little audiobook club had just listened to How the Penguins Saved Veronica which had me hankering for more on penguins.
Cinematographer turned author Lindsay McCrae is given the opportunity of a lifetime: Go to Antarctica to film as much as he can of a colony of Emperor penguins. THIS is what he’s lived his life for, ever since he was but a kid. Not much of a question about his going, but oh, it’ll be for 11 months, and oh, his girlfriend is so over being excited every time he jaunts around the world to shoot whatever, leaving her alone for months on end. So. 11 months?!
Still, she tells him he can go, and then we have an additional 7 hours of McCrae’s preparation for the trip and of his experiences at the research station over the following seasons. We hear of his insomnia through the times when the sun is NOT out 24/7; we hear of his despondency that he tries to get over by learning how to ride a unicycle (Crash! Into aaaaaalllll the bottles of beer!); we hear of how Becky is on his mind Each. And every. Day (Exceeeept for her birthday—that day, he kinda sorta forgets she exists…)!
So there’s all of that, McCrae’s personal life, but then there are the penguins. It’s soooo odd that there’s a certain detachment when he speaks of them initially, and kinda a bit throughout, but I had to remind myself that he was witnessing some specTACular things… through a camera… Whilst his friends and fellow crew were watching mating, birthing, dying? McCrae’s on the outside looking in, and p’raps that’s the weakest part of this book: He’s pretty detached from EVERYthing, from Becky, from his new baby, Walter, from the grievous suffering the penguins have to endure.
Errrr… until he’s not, which is the BEST part of the audiobook. As a lover of animal documentaries, I’ve always found it heartbreaking to know that the makers of such films live and die by the credo that they watch and watch only; they never interfere. So when true disaster strikes the penguins and there’s gore and carnage (And oh by the way? McCrae doesn’t spare us the details…), it was soooo wonderful that he and the others stepped in to just guiiiiiide the penguins, offering an alternative to death, and leaving it to them as to whether they’d utilize what the men had created. As the penguins had no prior contact with humans, they weren’t afraid of the men but simply saw them as other, benign, creatures. The little girl in me who once saw a crippled baby bear decline, decline, decline, until it was filmed dying? That little girl cheered mightily when humans intervened THIS time!
That was a bit of a spoiler, I see, but I wanted you to know that, while this does get graphic about how harsh Nature is to her Children, how Death is ever-present, and McCrae lets us know aaalll about it? It’s NOT without its glimpses of kindness and decency. And while McCrae sometimes seems like he’s a bit tooo detached, like maybe he hasn’t quite grasped how AWEsome an experience he’s having? I want you to know that he eventually does get it, so we’re all spared wanting to throttle him. No, he even finds a book, given to him yeeears earlier by a caring teacher, that somewhat foretells a hope for a grand tomorrow, which he realizes has become his today.
He narrates this himself, and he does a marvelous job. When he’s being forthright about how little he seems to feel when his son is born, he doesn’t come off as a cad so much as he seems oblivious and confused as to why he’s only weeping but not really feeling the immediate bond. And when it comes to the end of his time at the research station, having to say goodbye to men who’ve become like family to him? When he has to say goodbye to the penguins, not knowing if the youngsters will be able to molt as quickly as the ice is melting? His emotions are well and truly in his voice. Oh gosh, I was weeping at the end.
Yeh, he’s a trifle cut off; and yeh, this ain’t the BEST writing out there (I heard about how extraORDinary the icebergs were, but there wasn’t all the descriptive writing one might expect), but I found this to be a wonderful way to spend 7 1/2 hours. Not too long; not too short…
…Juuuuuust right….!
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