BOOK REVIEW: Holy Cow by David Duchovny

Shane | 31 March 2015 | Reply

BOOK REVIEW: Holy Cow by David Duchovny
Hatchette Australia, rrp$24.99 – February 2015
Reviewed by Shane Pinnegar
8/10

David Duchovny – actor, director and screenwriter – can now add author to his CV with the release of this delightful, dark fairytale that is decidedly NOT for children.

Elsie Bovary, a dairy cow in America’s hinterland, isn’t like all the other cows – she’s far more inquisitive and sensitive, and when she sees the farmer’s family gathered around their Box God watching a documentary about meat farming, she is shocked, repulsed, and desperate to escape.

Teaming up with a Jewish pig named Shalom and a scrawny turkey named Tom who can fly a plane but not himself, they embark on a mission to fly to safety – India for Elsie, where her kind are sacred; Israel for Shalom, where they put no pork on their fork; and Turkey itself for Tom, for no reason other than it’s name and the fact they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving.

Holy Cow is a magical reality adventure tale in which a cow can don a trenchcoat and board a commercial airliner, a turkey can operate a mobile phone with his beak and fly a small plane across the ocean, and a camel can shame Israeli and Palestinians to join together in their hatred of pigs in an eloquent speech while dodging thrown rocks.

Wise-cracking their way around the world and back our heroes also make one thing perfectly clear: that the way we keep and slaughter animals for meat is often barbaric and inhuman. Hardly a surprising theme from Duchovny – a former vegetarian who now eats fish.

Originally pitched as a movie concept to several studios years ago, Duchovny has made Holy Cow an engaging and often charming parable about tolerance between religions and species, which is light on overt proselytising (well… light to medium in places), but nonetheless contains a strong and timely underlying message.