Puck

A novel by Victor Pelevin

A Hu-Li is at least 40,000 thousand years old. She’s also a fox in both the literal and the vernacular sense of the word—a fox who happens to be a member of a species who morphologically resemble human women. And live a long time without growing old—or even, necessarily, mature.

A Hu-Li and her sisters are sexual predators. They are, in other words, a top-level crypto-predator species that happens to feed on human sexual energy. Obviously, then, a fox’s perfect disguise is as a high-class prostitute. What better character to skewer the norms of society than the prostitute who pops the bubble of every hypocritical prick along her journey to enlightenment? A Hu-Li and her sisters are not human and don’t care about our values. A Hu-Li has her own. She’s not a liberated sex worker, she’s a predator.

An enticing one, too: she wears her years of experience with cunning wit, style, pragmatic grace and imperial wisdom—most of the time. The narrative sweet spot Pelevin has found in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, and the one that powers this character-driven novel, lies in the friction between A Hu-Li’s human enculturation and her animal instincts, a friction awash in a superseding assumption: all beings are searching for the levels of their souls. A Hu-Li manages to remain a haughty bitch while purporting a profoundly leveling philosophy.A Hu-Li is a Buddhist with Taoist inclinations. In previous Pelevin novels (Buddha’s Little Finger, obviously among others) religion has played an important role, even to the extent of becoming a character but in The Sacred Book we get a close up look at a Pelevin messiah, and she’s working hard to convert us, often by quoting ancient Buddhist scripture. Her yearning for enlightenment, her desire to enter the “Rainbow River,” tempers the animal magic of her tail, the tool of her predatory trade. This yearning is not what makes her human; Pelevin presses her foxy difference. Instead, A Hu-Li’s yearning is the mark that signs us all as beings seeking the levels of our souls. Here she is talking to Alexander, a general in love with her, about his choice of reading material:

Speaking in very simple terms, I can say this. Reading is human contact, and the range of our human contacts is what makes us what we are. Just imagine you live the life of a long-distance truck driver. The books that you read are like the travelers you take into your cab. If you give lifts to people who are cultured and profound, you’ll learn a lot from them. If you pick up fools, you’ll turn into a fool yourself. Wasting time on detective novels is… it’s like giving an illiterate prostitute a ride for the sake of a blowjob.”

A Hu-Li dissembles, feigns, passes as human. Unlike her lover Alexander, it’s not her web of human contacts that make her who she is. She’s a were-fox, a mistress of deception. Furthermore, she doesn’t give blowjobs. Foxes have a secret weapon: they have telepathic tails, instruments productive of supreme human sexual bliss. But to learn how that works, you’ll need to read the novel.

Ikkyu, the great Japanese poet and Zen master of the 15th century, said: If you want me, look for me in the whorehouse. Soul searching, in other words, is classless—or should be, according to a fox’s sense of judgment:

It is usually assumed that were-creatures are not concerned about spiritual problems. People think you turn into a fox or a wolf, howl at the moon, tear someone’s throat out, and all the great questions of life are instantly answered, and it’s clear who you are, what you’re doing in this world, where you came from and where you’re going… But that’s not the way it is at all. We are far more tormented by the riddles of existence than modern humans. But the cinema continues to depict us as complacent, earth-bound gluttons, nonentities who are indistinguishable from each other, cruel and squalid consumers of the blood of others.”

It’s true: vampires get all the good press. With the were-fox A Hu-Li, what we get is a 40,000-year-old cynic philosopher, one who remembers inscriptions and conversations across thousands of years of human history, a philosopher dancing madly across all barriers of sociopolitical correctness, and one who takes her Buddhism pretty damn seriously. A Hu-Li is a babe, a bodhisattva, she’s a cruel mirror, and she’s very, very funny. This fox has bite.

review by Brian Charles Clark

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