'In a feral twist on crime fiction, Cal, a mutt with a criminal past, must step back into the world of animal violence to avenge the death of his wife and protect his pups from the inherent darkness of nature.
'A stunning anthropomorphic tale of love and revenge, Ragged; or, The Loveliest Lies of All is a dark story of a vibrant animal community in a New England wood. Grieving the loss of his wife to a mysterious case of rabies, Cal must avenge her death and protect his pups from the coming winter and the horrors of the forest. It's Wind in the Willows and Fantastic Mr. Fox meet Fargo in Christopher Irvin's signature slice-of-life crime style.'
Ragged isn't your typical crime noir mystery. Yes, there's characters with dark pasts, criminals, death, and infection on the horizon that all put this small community in danger, but thanks to Christopher Irvin's wonderfully weird imagination Ragged does something very different; it sets it all in a community of woodland animals.
Cal is a dog who grew up outside of the woodland community, a member of the wasteland gang, a group of criminals and killers made up of rats, stoats, and weasels, headed up by Maurice, the cruel raccoon. But Cal has long since given up on that old life, having started a family and become a member of the woodland community. However, when his wife, Winifred, goes missing Cal tracks her down to the fells, where she's fled to escape her family, to keep them safe as the infection that courses through her blood turns her feral. Cal does the only thing he can, and ends his wife's suffering.
Keeping Winifred's infection and subsequent death a secret, lest the community think he and his family could be sick and cast them out, Cal tries to find out how his wife was infected in a bid to seek revenge. As Cal investigates the rest of the community tries to deal with the increasingly difficult problems that come from a lack of food and supplies as the local traders haven't visited the village in weeks. Everyone is on edge, waiting for help to come; and with infection and the denizens of the wasteland stirring more trouble is on the horizon for the citizens of the woodlands.
The blurb for Ragged described the story as being a cross between Wind in the Willows and Fargo, and that's a pretty apt description. The book features anthropomorphic animals yes, but it's not a story for kids, and has a much darker tone. The book begins with Winifred being infected, struggling to focus and to get away from her family, and the tone doesn't really get any lighter from there. There's a constant sense of unease and sadness that permeates the book, and as the reader you're waiting for something worse to happen as Cal and the others try their best to carry on.
The story has a large cast of characters, and if the book was featuring humans I think that perhaps it would be easy to get lost as you get dropped into this large community of people. However, thanks to the cast being made up of different animals it became a lot easier to keep track of who everyone was, and what kind of person they were. The characters aren't just regular humans in animal form, and have aspects of their animal personalities baked into them. Certain traits that would feel weird, or perhaps over-the-top in humans fit perfectly with the characters of Ragged, especially as they walk a fine line between civilised and feral.
The story is definitely improved by it being animals as well, and whilst this could have worked in some form with people, changing out the rabies infection to some other form of disease that could cause problems for the community, it just wouldn't have been the same. Irvin didn't just take a story and throw animals into it, but made a plot and a world that could only work because of the unique take on the characters. So much of this book comes back to it being these anthropomorphic animals that you don't even realise how much world building and clever creation has gone on because you're so wrapped up in the main mystery to realise.
I really do think that Ragged is one of those books that will give you different feelings whilst reading it to when you've finished, and that once you start looking back at it once its done you start to see how much bigger it was than you first thought, and how much more intricate everything is. Because of this I think this could easily be one of those books that people end up reading more than once, just to try and get more and more out of it.
Ragged was an enjoyable read, one that was more complex and interesting than I was first expecting, with some unique ideas and innovative takes on the genre that a lot of stories would struggle to get away with. One that's definitely worth checking out for fans of the genre who're looking for something a bit different.
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