This is an audiobook that I believe was recommended because I expressed interest in different posts about both animals stories in which the animals displayed realistic if unusual levels of intelligence (not like Animal Farm where it is just a parable showing humans in animal form or a rat that actually prepares food) and homelessness.
The book opens with a scene apparently unrelated to the cover art (which indeed shows an animal, a rat, looking intently at an old-fashioned pocket watch) in which two homeless men struggle in plain view of subway passengers awaiting a train — the main character is almost heartbroken as he later boards a train with commuters who had witnessed the confrontation and yet had done nothing.
It is only later that we discover the role that the rats play in the story — I personally think the level of awareness that one rat in particular displays is at the outer reaches of rodent intelligence, but still possible.
How accurately the plight of the homeless guy (a former office worker) is portrayed is another question. I found the lack of detail about this somewhat frustrating — I wondered why he had not managed to simply find another job. Whether this was a consequence of ageism, we do not know although I did not get the impression that he was supposed to be very old.
Sometimes it just happens — this very year, I was panhandled by a man who appeared to be in his 20s and if he was actually 30 I would be surprised and he told me he had lost his job at a bank. I am sure that with online shopping and some brick -and-mortar stores insisting on credit cards, the need for cash is way down and that is pretty much the main reason that I visit a bank in person, so that someone can go from a decent job to homelessness is not implausible.
Maybe how exactly that the main character became homeless is not the most important thing — the book goes into details about the way the man dealt with being homeless.
One of my favorite ideas is expressed by another character who tries to help him but seems to almost despair of being able to do so (which I think many of us do — of course we would like to help, but realistically, how many of us have the resources to really change the circumstances of someone in that situation?). Even though this second character does indeed help the homeless man, he sees as a problem the likelihood that he will not be able to acquire "the skills of a poor man" as he contemplates the difficulties the homeless man (whose history he knows something of) will have in fitting in to a minimum-wage job that involves intensive manual labor and other challenges he will face just surviving even with a job.
I would be interested in what other people think of how realistically the situation and challenges of the main character are described.
I liked very much the description of the bright subway-dwelling rat who not only befriends the man but helps him in a very useful way — unclear if this was intentional, but this tiny rodent makes a huge difference. (This particular rat is fascinated by humans and their technology as is hinted at by the cover art.)
If you read about rat cognition, you might be surprised at just how intelligent, despite their small size, they have been discovered to be. I believe experiments have revealed that rats are as bright or brighter than dogs or cats and even in certain respects actually more intelligent than humans although I find that hard to believe — but it is true, for example, that chimps have much better short-term recall than humans do and there is a bird called the Clark's nutcracker which will create caches of seeds in multiple locations and remember a large number of them. Given that some create 10 thousand or more such caches this is remarkable and I believe only a trained human mnemonist can do something like that. (The birds have been observed placing stones to mark such caches and they will pause to (it is suggested) take "mental snapshots" of the locations.)
Bottom line, I think most people tend to underestimate the mental capabilities of animals — I believe the first scientific study of the intelligence of parrots was only undertaken relatively recently by Irene Pepperberg — her work with the bird Alex began roughly 40 years ago and if you have not yet seen a video of Alex doing things like counting corners on geometrical shapes and even answering questions about two different objects like "What is the same?" (a red square and a red triangle being presented will result in Alex saying "color" — I do not want to spoil your fun by telling you what happens when he is shown a red square and a green triangle).
So I am also interested in what people think about how the rat with whom the homeless guy interacts is portrayed.
by relesabe