Amphibian, by Carla Gunn

Phineas Walsh is an unusually bright nine-year-old with all kinds of regular worries — the recent death of his grandfather, being bullied at school, his parents’ puzzling separation — but he has bigger worries too, specifically the mounting consequences of our wanton destruction of the planet. A “Green Channel” fanatic, Phin absorbs as much information as possible about the earth’s creatures, and inevitably, how their future existence is in constant peril. Unfortunately, he has trouble finding people who share his pressing concerns — his father encourages him but is rarely around, his teacher is a dolt, his friend Bird assures his he’ll “try” to worry a bit more, and his mother humours him until she decides the Green Channel is causing her son too much anxiety. Then she does the most anxiety-provoking thing Phin could imagine — forbids him to watch the Green Channel. Like the novel’s titular creature, Phin is extremely vulnerable to changes in his environment. He jokes to his mom that her dating a new man “upset my homeostasis” (a line I most definitely plan on using in my own life in the future), but shutting out the Green Channel is the most drastic change to Phin’s environment possible, and perhaps the most damaging. It seems that even with the best intentions, humans still are capable of significant damage to their fellow creatures.

The joy of Amphibian is Phin’s unique perspective on the world. After having discovered most adults just lie to him, he’s determined to find the facts for himself. He studies the baffling behaviour of the people in his life as a scientist might, with keen observation and dogged logic, forever comparing human actions to those in the animal kingdom. Sometimes these comparisons are humourous, sometimes heartbreaking, but always entirely apt and eye-opening. Take his analysis of

“Sometimes when two mountain gorillas fight, and infant will put himself in the middle and the two gorillas calm down.
Maybe I should have jumped between Mom and Dad that first time they fought. But I didn’t. And now it might be too late.”

Of course all of these animal comparisons aren’t just interesting or touching, but over the course of the novel, they all support Phin’s case — that humans, in fact, are just another kind of animal, and not a particularly commendable one. Phin’s voice remains consistent throughout the work — unerringly logical, easily irritated, and often funny. He’s an exasperating child to be sure, and his mother will be the first to admit it, often driven to the heights of frustration by her son’s single-mindedness. In fact, I appreciated that Phin’s mother is realistically rendered, and her reactions to her son seem completely natural, never descending into the caricature that often results in novels written from a child’s perspective.

Gunn’s prose rushes with the relentless energy of its tireless protagonist, injecting the everyday events in Phin’s life with such narrative momentum that I polished off the book in less than two days. I left this charming book with more animal fun facts that you’d glean from a “Green Channel” marathon, but what resonated most was the importance of the tenuous connections that hold us together, for as Phineas so clearly demonstrates, there is nothing more worrisome than thinking that you’re all on your own.

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