One of the best perks of writing the SFF Bestiary has been the opportunity to catch up with films and books that I’ve been aware of but never got around to. This week I’m finally getting to Tanya Huff’s Keeper series. I’m late to the party, but it’s definitely worth the wait.
The first volume is set in Kingston, Ontario, and it’s thoroughly and delightfully Canadian. It was written in the 1990s, which adds to the charm. Computers and the internet exist, but cell phones are some years away from becoming ubiquitous.
In this universe, ordinary humans, the children of Eve, live side by side with the descendants of Lilith. Members of her Lineage are wielders of magic. They defend the world against the powers of darkness—unless, as sometimes happens, they join the other side.
Most of them are called Cousins, with lesser powers and responsibilities. A chosen few, with much greater powers, are called Keepers.
Claire is a Keeper, as is her sister Diana. Her parents are Cousins. She travels from place to place, drawn by arcane summons to locate and shut down hellmouths. As the novel begins, she finds herself in a rundown guest house with a couple of supernatural longtime guests, a seriously sexy but much too young maintenance guy, and Hell in the basement.
It seems that Claire may have landed in a permanent posting, well before she’s ready to settle down to any such thing. How she copes with that, and what she does about it, is a wild and sometimes hilarious ride. But this is the Bestiary, and it’s not Claire we’re interested in. We’re here for the cat.
Austin arrives with Claire, and he’s much more than a companion animal (though he serves admirably in that capacity). For one thing, he talks. For another, when he’s not delivering zingers and pungent commentary, he’s offering wise and often valuable advice. Austin knows things. Sometimes it seems he knows more than the Keeper, though she does not like to admit it.
We never, in the first volume at least, learn how Austin became the full partner of a Keeper. It doesn’t seem that it’s standard for a Keeper to have a cat companion or familiar, nor does he come from any specific lineage, as far as we can tell. He’s just there. He comes with the package that is Claire.
Aside from the talking part and the knows-everything-important part, Austin is a normal cat. He’s black and white, and he’s a little on the chunky side. He is not young: he’s seventeen in the novel, which is well up there for a cat, and he’s down eight lives, he says. His vet has him on a strict diet. He does not like his prescription food at all and does his best to talk the humans around him into giving him food he’s not supposed to have. Mmm sausages.
He had another human companion before he came to Claire and her family. That person had him neutered. This usually is a painful point among cats in fiction, but Austin has come to terms with it. It’s much less distracting not to have to deal with hormones and catfights.
In spite of his advanced age, Austin is quite spry. He’s a mighty hunter of mice and things that aren’t exactly mice. He takes pleasure and pride in tormenting the annoying neighbor’s horrible dog, Baby, about whom he knows something that the humans manage to miss for quite a long time. Austin doesn’t trouble himself to enlighten them; it’s up to them to figure it out.
Austin’s speech is comprehensible to any human who happens to be within earshot. He doesn’t go out of his way to reveal it to what people of the Lineage call bystanders.
Bystanders are not supposed to be aware of the supernatural happenings around them. If something does slip through, a Keeper will usually alter their memories. Ignorance, in bystanders, is not just bliss. It’s necessity.
If for some reason they do manage to catch on, a human has to believe in order to perceive. For example if they believe in ghosts but not in vampires, they may see the ghost but fail to recognize the creature of the night. Even then, as often as not they’ll rationalize the experience.
The Keeper and her cat walk a delicate line between the mundane and supernatural worlds. It’s easy enough for Austin: cats live in that liminal space, though it’s not clear whether he’s unique in his command of human language. We don’t meet any other cats in this first volume, and the dog speaks dog; Austin understands him and will, if he’s in the mood, translate for the humans.
Whoever he is, wherever he comes from, Austin is indispensable. Claire might think she’s all that—Keepers, especially young ones, tend be arrogant—but she relies on him for everything from emotional support and late-night cuddles to sage advice and the occasional reality check. She wouldn’t be half the Keeper she is if she didn’t have him for backup.
