Two legs bad

David Profumo

A Stray 175pp Walker £8 0744508010

The household cat seems to polarize human affections more drastically than any other animal Those who love these aloof peripheral beasts confer on them idealized qualities of intelligence and independence that make catworshipping worshipping literature tedious to the infidel but it is a measure of A N Wilson's psychological logical subtlety that after twenty chapters of his feline biography the present reviewer (if not an ailourophobe then a confirmed cynic and doglover lover found he had been converted The narrator of Stray is a seven-year-old tabby who is telling his grandson the story of his life He is known in the neighbourhood as Pufftail but refuses to answer to that or any other name since the naming of things is a ritual of enslavement which he resents as strongly...