I'd been really looking forward to reading this, but although I liked it I was honestly a little disappointed. There's such a fantastic idea here: three novellas, about three generations of captive polar bears. There's nothing realistic about these bears; they are thoroughly anthropomorphised as a writer, a circus performer, and finally a zoo exhibit (the famous, and famously ill-fated Knut of the Berlin Zoo). And there's genuinely something satirical and cutting about how, in each case, the human desire to exploit the bears has shaped their lives, has produced in each case a sort of tragic bear-human hybrid. Because really, if you train a bear, force it to wear clothes and perform, then sooner or later the plasticity of image encouraged - even enforced - by those actions will impact on the behaviour of the bear.

Despite the wittiness of the concept, however, and the excellent and deliberately chosen ambiguities inherent in this entire conceit, the emotional core was absent for me. Admittedly, this is less notable in the Knut sections than in the others; still I often found myself admiring but frequently unmoved. I got very little sense of the emotional lives of these animals, and while I understand it must be difficult to create this while not making them seem identical, in their inner workings, to humans, the result wasn't particularly successful. I felt I was reading a clever book about polar bears, a book that sometimes went to strange and unsuccessful places (the insertion of the Michael Jackson sections seemed an utter waste of time, for instance). Rarely, sadly, did those bears come alive for me.