Tag: fragile animals

Fragile Animals is a haunting novel about religion, sex, family, and the idea of sin. Noelle flees her life as a hotel cleaner in Leith to the Isle of Bute, staying in a hotel in which she meets Moses, who tells her he is a vampire. As they draw closer to each other by confessing lovers, the lingering trauma of Noelle’s Catholic past and her mother’s affair with their priest surfaces, and maybe a vampire was exactly what she needed to confront her own ideas of sin and weakness.

This book is an experience, a fascinating way of using a vampire as a plot device in a book that is a literary exploration of sexuality, guilt and religious trauma. Jagger plays with the audience, making Noelle at times unreliable and with a distinctive narrative style that luxuriates in hot and cold, in sensations and specific wording. Noelle is torn between binary ideas of good and evil, straight and gay, right and wrong, and she’s an interesting protagonist because of this, someone searching for certainty she can’t get. The book is gothic and luscious, but it’s also about bodily fluids and dirt, and mostly about what people desire and what they actually do. 

On a personal level, I found it funny that it had a few elements/details that I’m particularly familiar with (the fact that Satanism isn’t actually what it sounds like, the village of Crail) and I liked that it had sharp realistic details whilst also being dreamy and unreal at times. I imagine people going into it for the vampire sex element might’ve expected there to be more, but the build up feels like the more plot-crucial part. I really liked how Noelle’s relationship with Lomie was slowly explained through the book—it could’ve been a separate book itself, but instead, it’s like a faux-background plot that Noelle is purposefully positioning as such. 

Fragile Animals is a book about religious trauma and sexuality that happens to contain a vampire, and there’s something very funny about that.I thought near the start that I had a handle on what the book would be, but actually it was quite different, in a refreshing way that made it much more of a literary journey through a character’s troubled past than a ‘bad boy vampire’ story (not that there’s anything wrong with the latter—I love vampire books—but I liked the complexity of this version).