Animal Husbandry

By EMILY MITCHELL

Though weakening, the primal links between humans and wild animals are not yet entirely dissolved. In The Great Divorce (Doubleday; 340 pages; $22.50), novelist Valerie Martin weaves together three narratives to explore those connections. Ellen, the veterinarian for a New Orleans zoo, does not like the compromises she has to make. But, she understands, "that's the deal." She feels the hopelessness of preserving animals in "a netherworld of human scrutiny and intervention" by maintaining an ark for captive species that will never sleep freely under a night sky. In her marriage, she accepts her husband's infidelities. Finally, he has the one affair that wives dread: he falls in love with a younger woman and steps away from his old life.

Camille, a keeper for the zoo's large cats, is poised dangerously between two harsh worlds. Disturbed and lonely, she is treated cruelly by most of her own kind, and is drawn more and more to the large caged cats in her charge. Reality blurs, and she merges her identity with that of a sleek leopard in her care.

Martin re-examined Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde through the eyes of the doctor's housemaid in her 1990 novel Mary Reilly. The author reaches into a fictional past again, combining the stories of Ellen and Camille with an account of a notorious 19th century Louisiana "catwoman." When the body of this woman's plantation-owner husband was found with his throat ripped away, she was calmly playing the piano, her hands, dress and mouth covered with blood.

Of the protagonists in Martin's book, two are doomed; only Ellen discovers a small measure of hope when she nurses a stricken jaguar back to health. In all three of its tales, though, The Great Divorce evocatively humanizes the wild nature that is just beneath the surface of us all.