Literary Look at Struggle to Survive

THE EXTINCTION CLUB

By Robert Twigger

William Morrow

222 pages, $23.95

For every book we read, there are at least two stories lurking within the covers: the tale the author intended from the outset to write, and the book that actually resulted. If the author is writing nonfiction, the choices of how to tell the story are extensive, but open the door to fabrication, and the possibilities become nearly endless.

As readers, we’re usually aware of only the completed work, blissfully unconcerned about the many permutations that took place between the book’s conception and its final birth as a published volume.

British author and adventure journalist Robert Twigger (“Big Snake: The Hunt for the World’s Longest Python”) succeeds with “The Extinction Club” in giving us a number of morphing story lines in one slim, yet amazingly cohesive volume.

A mostly nonfiction exploration into the near-extinction and miraculous rescue of the exotic Milu deer, “The Extinction Club” also reveals the messy, often contradictory process of an author stumbling his way through to a sustained narrative, using fact, fibs and whatever it takes, while bringing the reader along on his quest.

Focused on the concept of extinction, the tale is multitiered. One layer follows Twigger’s life as a struggling writer when a phone call changes his life with the offer of a lucrative book contract. “I’d been fantasizing about this phone call for 10 years,” he tells us. “

He’s asked to write a book on the Milu deer (also known as Pere David), an animal so rare that it’s been extinct in its native China since the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 but has survived in pockets around the world. Most notably, the deer can be killed for a price, he tells us, at a Texas wild game preserve.

The odd-looking mammal (neck of a camel, horns of a stag, tail of a donkey and feet of a cow) once belonged solely to the Chinese emperor in Beijing who kept a number of the deer hidden for 1,000 years in a walled retreat and insisted that his staff keep secret the deer’s existence.

In 1865, the hidden species was “discovered” by a Basque missionary priest, Pere David (from which the species takes one of its common names), who shipped deer remains to zoologists in Paris. Soon, a number of European nations had nabbed a deer or two of their own, and an eccentric English nobleman, the 11th Duke of Bedford, helped deer thrive in Bedfordshire, where today there is a sizable herd.

In short chapters that sometimes seem non sequiturs, Twigger ushers readers deep into the adventure of the Milu deer, paralleling their near extinction with the demise and tentative reawakening of Egypt’s Ezbekiya Gardens, a massive Cairo market for secondhand books, while illustrating the harrowing endeavor of writing a book.

He uses data, conjecture, a hefty measure of humor and philosophical ramblings to question the boundaries between truth and invention. (If you’ve ever been to the wonderful Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, this is a similar experience, though more weighted to the factual.)

Artfully, Twigger ties the postmodern tale together with the thinnest of filament--but it’s enough. We’re invited to collect the puzzle pieces he drops along the way and assemble in our own minds a concept of extinction that is vaster, perhaps, than we had considered.

Though we do learn about the deer, of primary concern to Twigger is an investigation into what dying out means to us as a species, we who hold the potential to annihilate ourselves.

It’s less our physical demise that is cause for concern, Twigger suggests, than the slow, insidious death of consciousness among humans, the numbing that takes place in our consumer-minded, entertainment-obsessed world, which he sees as a precursor of the ultimate snuffing out. “Hope, self-belief, natural wonder: all these can be switched off, year by year, and slowly the individual becomes extinct.”

There’s optimism, too. Researching the precarious rejuvenation of the deer, Twigger sees in their tenacity a reflection of what he hopes will be the perseverance of books, of writers, of ourselves.

Much of the gravity is cloaked in humor, as in this description of a road-trip companion: “It’s easy to travel with someone who has both sheepish and impish grins in his repertoire.” But the narrative is still pensive and deep.

Twigger encourages readers, in this book within a book within a book, to draw personal correlations among the lives of deer, books, writers and ourselves and to look our own extinction in the eye.

Perhaps it’s not so much the deer and other endangered species we should be concerned with saving, he suggests. “All along it is not animals that have been most at risk, but ourselves, our innermost selves.”