I admit it. I like the furry creatures. It's probably not surprising, considering I'm a city lover.
Why do I think the homely little rat is so neat? Well,
Robert Sullivan, author
of
Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants (Bloomsbury),
says it best:
Behold the rat, dirty and disgusting!
Thoreau went to Walden Pond to live simply in the wild and contemplate his own place in the world by observing nature. Robert Sullivan went to a disused, garbage-filled little alley in lower Manhattan to contemplate the city and its lesser-known inhabitants—by observing the rat.
Rats live in the world precisely where humans do; they survive on the effluvia of human society; they eat our garbage. While dispensing gruesomely fascinating rat facts and strangely entertaining rat-stories—everyone has one, it turns out—Sullivan gets to know not just the beast but its friends and foes: the exterminators, the sanitation workers, the agitators and activists who have played their part in the centuries-old war between human city dweller and wild city rat. With a notebook and night-vision gear, he sits nightly in the streamlike flow of garbage and searches for fabled rat-kings, sets out to trap a rat, and eventually travels to the Midwest to learn about rats in Chicago, Milwaukee, and other cities of America. With tales of rat fights in the Gangs of New York era and stories of Harlem rent strike leaders who used rats to win tenants basic rights, Sullivan looks deeper and deeper into the largely unrecorded history of the city and its masses—its herd-of-rats-like mob. Funny, wise, sometimes disgusting but always compulsively readable, Rats earns its unlikely place alongside the great classics of nature writing.
Did you know?
· 26% of all electric cable breaks and 18% of all phone cable disruptions are caused by rats, 25% of all fires of unknown origin are rat-caused, and rats destroy an estimated 1/3 of the world’s food supply each year. The rat has been called the world’s most destructive mammal—other than man.
· Male and female rats may have sex twenty times a day. A female can produce up to twelve litters of twenty rats a year: one pair of rats has the potential for 15,000 descendants in a year. (From back cover)
As disgusting as the topic of this book can be to some people, it's obviously very popular. Even the university crowd has latched on. Robert Kotyk of The Manitoban (University of Manitoba, Sept. 15, 2004) wrote the following review:
Most people don’t like to talk about gross things. For example, when you’re sitting down over a couple of tuna sandwiches and a container of cottage cheese with a co-worker for lunch, you will most likely rely upon such cafeteria-friendly topics as the weather, weekend plans or the rising cost of gas. For most, the prospect of having a conversation about rats while you’re trying to choke down yesterday’s stir-fry is downright unpleasant.
Reading about gross things, however, is another matter altogether. Who hasn’t, for example, flipped stealthily through The Guinness Book of World Records, specifically to see the picture of the guy with obscenely long fingernails? The pleasure in seeing or reading about something disgusting in a book is different because it creates a kind of private illicitness that can keep you turning the pages in search of the next disturbing thrill.
Michael Sullivan’s new book, Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants (Bloomsbury), succeeds in this way, unsettling the reader with just the right amount of details about the animals that, according to Sullivan, no one wants to talk about. “Rats command a perverse celebrity status,” he writes,—“nature’s mobsters, flora and fauna serial killers—because of their species-destroying habits, and because of their disease-carrying ability.”
For Sullivan, rats are the species with which humans share the most. “To know the rat,” begins one chapter, “one has to know the rat’s habitat, which is of course the city.” Using the rat as a springboard, then, Sullivan is able to pursue everything from the history of New York, to urban decay, to poverty, all the while infusing his narration with about as much hard information about rats as you’ll ever get in one volume.
Peppered throughout all of these concerns, however, are spine-tingling rat stories. In one, a woman is attacked by a hungry pack of rats as she is walking to her car. In another, a group of men set a dog against a bunch of starving rats so they can bet on the winner. These stories, you find out, are the kind that exterminators share when they talk shop, and they are exactly the kinds of stories that turn what is ostensibly a natural history into a royal page-turner.
For an extended period of time leading up to the publication of the book, Sullivan lived with rats. He became obsessed with observing their every move and would even spend hours in the alleys of New York City. In the book, he talks to everyone he can think of who might be able to offer him some insight about rats: exterminators, other alley-dwellers, slumlords and scientists.
While spending time with Larry Adams, one of the city’s most respected exterminators, Sullivan writes, “If you hang around with Larry long enough, you realize that he sees the city in a way that most people don’t—in layers ... He sees the city that is on the maps and the city that was on the maps—the city’s past, the city of hidden speakeasies and ancient tunnels, the inklings of old streams and hills.”
In many ways, for Sullivan, the history of rats in the city is the history of New York itself, and in his book he offers a new way of looking at the animals that inhabit the exact same places that we do, and at the neighborly relationship that most people refuse to admit.
Overall, Rats is an obsessively researched and creepily sympathetic account of rats and humankind’s rocky connection to them. A good read, but not the kind of book you want to discuss over lunch.
Robert Kotyk is the Manitoban’s News Editor and he is completing a BA in
English.
I'm sure it won't surprise you to know that I own DVD copies of the movies The Rats (2002, TV) and Willard (2003). Here's a list of other movies with rats in them. Sometimes I really do worry about my sanity. Nah, I just like reality.