Unlikely Animals

Corbin Park is a vast, mysterious wilderness on the doorstep of Everton, but it remains unfathomably secret and is rich in symbolism. Clive reads the park as a metaphor for his own impending death, imagining crossing over into the park as crossing over into the afterlife:

A secret forest was an obvious metaphor for death, something his college students could have come up with. When Clive was ready to die, Harold would take him to Corbin Park, and there Clive would finally see the ghost of the Sprite, Harold’s pet fox that Clive had only seen once at the edge of the woods. The Sprite was the Grim Reaper in the metaphor (189).

Other residents see the woods similarly, as a place of crossing over. Brayden also says, “I think there’s some instinct to head to the woods to die. That shit’s primeval” (124). When Clive finally goes to the park, he finds quite the opposite is true. Clive’s foray into Corbin Park causes the rediscovery of Crystal and Isabella—their return from the dead.

Harold and his admirers tend to depict Corbin Park in a romantic light, as an unspoiled wilderness removed from the corruption and decay of the modern world: “It is miraculous how the green-clad land has returned to its virgin state, and the folds of the blue hills inspire restful dreams” (25). The park is imagined as a place of renewal, rest, and healing. However, the park’s image of pristine innocence is somewhat compromised by the fact that it is an artificially stocked hunting range for suspiciously secretive billionaires.

For Clive and Emma, the imaginative possibilities of the park are far more interesting than its reality. In Chapter 11, Emma recalls her father telling her elaborate bedtime stories about the park and relaying Rudyard Kipling’s extravagant anecdotes about his time staying there. The more historically accurate Ingrid insists that Kipling’s tales of crocodiles cannot be true, but Clive is enchanted with Kipling’s idea of the park and is uninterested in factual accuracy:

Emma remembered the elaborate bedtime stories her dad used to tell, stories that almost always ended with one of her mean classmates left to the jaws of the crocodiles of Corbin Park. If Emma’s mother was in earshot, she would say that here had never been crocodiles in the park, even if Rudyard Kipling had said there were, Kipling had lived in the area for a few years with his American wife in the late 1800s, around the time the park opened, and he said the park was full of ‘lions an’ tigers an’ bears an’ buffalo an’ crocodiles an’ such all.’ Ingrid insisted a crocodile would never survive a New England winter (11).