Book review: “Anima Rising” by Christopher Moore

It’s not really a surprise that Sigmund Freud would get mad at Carl Jung after what Geoff did to the rug in Freud’s office while Jung was seeing a client there.

You understand, this didn’t actually happen although it is true that, for other reasons, Freud and Jung did have a pretty big spat.

What Geoff, a dopey, croissant-eating Malamute, did to the rug is part of the fever dream of a comic novel called Anima Rising from the estimable, randy and always wacky writer Christopher Moore — he, who, in earlier works, put the laughs in demons from hell (Practical Demonkeeping), vampires (Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story), King Lear’s fool (Fool) and the life of Jesus (Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal).

Jung, you see, was trying to help Judith, a sort of protégé of Gustav Klimt — Klimt pulled her naked dead body out of the Seine and then, well, she started breathing again — and Jung wanted to call forth again one of her multiple identities who presented as Inuit gods.

(Klimt had a thing about naked ladies. [Take a look at his works.] So did his artist buddy Egon Schiele. [Again, take a glance at his sketches.] And both had a thing about having sex with their models which, in Moore’s telling, was fine with and fun for the young women since it was softer work than, say, going to the factory or the brothel. Even so, neither artist made a pass at Judith which turned out to be smart, especially when they heard about the Dutch cop whose head was torn off.)

 

Mary Shelley’s monster

Anyway, these “Inuit gods” took over Judith’s speech every once in a while, and Jung took them to be aspects of her personality and the kind of archetypes he envisioned as an essential part of the shared psychology of all humans.

Judith saw them for what they were: the people with whom she had lived a long time in the Arctic in a place called the Underworld after escaping her life as a sex slave to Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s monster.

(Yes, instead of demons or vampires, Moore in Anima Rising is telling, in his own inimitable way, the story of Mary Shelley’s monster. In Moore’s story, though, the bride that Dr. Frankenstein started to create but destroyed is resurrected by the doctor’s minion, and then gets abducted by the monster, called Adam, for his own [but not her] sexual enjoyment — which Judith doesn’t like and eventually finds a way to get back at him, big time.)

 

“Died four times”

Jung was also trying to figure out how Judith could claim to be more than a century old and still look to be only twenty or so.

And why she said, as she often did, “I died four times.”

(Because of the minion’s ministrations in the laboratory, Judith seems to be immortal. Wait, that’s not quite right.  She can die and has, as she says, four times. But she comes back to life which is why she was able to visit — and, later, leave — the Underworld after making friends with gods such as Raven, the trickster, and Sedna the Sea Wife, a kind of Earth Mother, who call her Pale Girl and Little Bird.)

“There’s a good boy”

To help Jung understand the “Intuit gods,” Judith decided to show rather than tell.

So, she interrupted the therapy session to run downstairs, and, when she returned, she had with her the somewhat goofy sled dog Geoff.

(That’s Geoff as in Geoffry Chaucer because the Frankenstein monster was a fan of The Canterbury Tales as well as all of Shakespeare’s works, and he’s the one who named the dog during the time when he was using and abusing Judith’s unconscious body.)

Moore describes the scene this way:

Jung put down his notebook, rose, and went to them. He scratched Geoff behind the ears.

“There’s a good boy,” Jung said.

“Yes.” She released Geoff’s collar and stepped back, holding the leash. “Akhlut, makittuk! [Akhlut, rise!]” she said.

Akhlut rose.

 

Giant wolf…or orca

Moore does not describe what Jung saw at that moment, but, earlier in the novel, a detective tracking Judith witnesses Geoff turn into a giant wolf that “foamed and snarled, the sound so primal and terrifying that [the detective] thought he might lose control of his bladder.”

What Judith did in that moment was to call forth from Geoff the Inuit god Akhlut which, instead of showing up as a giant wolf, could appear as a giant orca whale.

In any case, Jung handled the surprise fairly well, it seemed, since he was willing to see Judith again for therapy. But there was the problem of Freud’s anger over what Geoff, er, Akhlut, did to his rug.

 

“Partially digested”

I know what you’re thinking. Some big god-size poop, right. Yeah, that’s something that Moore might come up with.  Instead, well, let’s hear what Judith said about it to Klimt while she was modeling for him. Klimt was interested in how bad the stain was on the rug that Geoff left.

“Geoff horked up a walrus.”

“Hold still. What do you mean, ‘a walrus’?”

“Just a baby one, although it was partially digested.”

“A walrus?…What, chewed-up meat that looked like a walrus?…”

“No, a whole baby walrus…Although, deceased. And partially digested.”

 

A blurb  for the paperback edition

There you have how Geoff ruined Sigmund Freud’s rug. And everything you need to know if you’re thinking about reading Christopher Moore’s Anima Rising.

If you’re OK with partially digested baby walruses, this is the book for you.

(Please, Christoper Moore, feel free to use that sentence as a blurb for the paperback copy of the book.)

 

Patrick T. Reardon

12.3.25