I guess there are a couple of very different ways to look at this book.

One is as the middle book in a trilogy, in which nothing much happens. What little story there is to be found was set up in the first book, 'Angel Catbird' and the resolution will presumably arrive in the third, 'The Catbird Roars'. The title, 'To Castle Catula' is pretty appropriate, because most of this volume is taken up by the journey. Our half-cat heroes have left their nightclub headquarters, Catastrophe, because Dr. A. Muroid and his rat army have blown it up, so they're walking through the woods to Castle Catula, the home of part-man, part-cat, part-bat Count Catula. There's a pact with Atheen-Owl and her half-owls, but that's about all.

The other is as an opportunity for Margaret Atwood to just have fun. I called the first book "goofy at best and outrageously juvenile at worst" and, to be brutally honest, this follows suit, but I'd say that the tone plays very differently to me. The first book felt like a throwback, something I might have enjoyed as a six-year-old reading it in instalments on a back of a cereal packet or some such, but which felt almost embarrassingly childish to me as an adult. I have a lot of grandchildren who are way too old for that sort of nonsense. This second book, however, is just a bundle of fun.

In its way, it's just as cartoonishly simple but there are far more characters in play and there's not a lot of backdrop getting in the way, so Atwood has fun with their interactions. That makes them a lot more engaging, the adult subtext behind the childish presentation is more apparent and they even garner some emotional depth. Heck, there are laboratory rats here who develop emotional depth, as they realise how batshit insane their lord and master is and decide they want no part of whatever megalomaniacal nonsense he's conjuring up.

To quickly recap the first book, Strig Feleedus is a scientist headhunted by Muroid Inc. to work on a top secret gene therapy project, but the mad half-rat that runs the company knocks him over with his car, thinking he can merely steal the formula he's completed for the MacGuffin serum. What he doesn't foresee is that the serum that splashes all over Strig's body, along with that of his cat and an owl that's swooping in at the time, turns him into a part-man, part-cat, part-owl creature soon to become known by an entire community of half-cats as Catbird.

So we have two sides. The half-cats are the good guys and Strig quickly falls for Cate Leone, who's their unofficial leader. The half-rats are the bad guys, which basically means Dr. Muroid, because he's the only one at present; there won't be more unless he can master the serum. So, until then, he has an army of rats, who aren't stupid, even though they allow him to strap explosives to their backs and send them on suicide missions. And there are thousands of them, meaning that the rats wildly outnumber the half-cats.

There's also the point of the book, which isn't actually to tell a story. It's to educate those here to read it about cats and birds and how we can help to keep them and their ecosystems healthy and safe. That's achieved through the story working through a whole series of deliberate beats which are then explained in prominent footnotes at the bottom of pages, courtesy of Nature Canada. I would point you to the website that's carefully included in every footnote, but it doesn't exist anymore.

For instance, Muroid dreams of capturing Cate and having his ratorturers tie her up and deliver a fate worse than death: by declawing her. Cue a quick footnote to explain why that's a bad thing for cats. Muroid's successful ploy to capture Catbird works through the use of a glass wall that he flies right into, prompting a footnote about how collisions with windows are the biggest problem that we cause for birds, after habitat loss, climate change and, well, cats. And so on. Much of this isn't particularly surprising but I've learned a few of things I didn't know from these footnotes.

When I saw 'Angel Catbird' on a thrift store bookshelf, I had to buy it to find out precisely what I'd get from a graphic novel written by someone as established in literature as Margaret Atwood. It looked like a single story, but it wasn't and I was in two minds about continuing, not least because the thrift store only had that first volume. Fortunately the other two are available to borrow from the Internet Archive's library, because this one plays so much better to me for a slew of reasons and Muroid's giant flying cat toy drone is far from the only one. Where can I buy one of those?

There's a far more overt sense of humour, for a start. It's not just cheese. There's wordplay all over the place—We're cats! What's wrong with catty? Why is that a negative?"—and the puns keep on flowing, especially when it comes to the cats from world culture and history. The Egyptian half-cat called Mummycat, wrapped in funereal bandages from head to toe, used to be Queen Neferkitti. There's a half-cat poet in a toga inevitably called Catullus—his epic is 'The Caturbury Tales'. Cat o' Nine Tales, who has nine tails, has, well, nine tales to tell. All involving tails. When they stumble on a stray kitten in the forest, it's adopted by Babushkat, who's a motherly Russian peasant half-cat. PSA: don't abandon cats. Frickin' kitten dumpers.

The humour extends to adult themes. There's almost a catfight (ha!) over Strig, when Atheen-Owl calls and his instincts answer. Cate is not happy. "At least I'm not descended from an omelette!" is my favourite line in this book. "I've coughed up hairballs better looking than you!" is good too. It's a fun scene but it also suggests the possibility of interspecies polyamory, which isn't something I'd ever expect to come across in a graphic novel aimed at kids. There's also a whole section that ties to a bra, because Count Catula had to spend a night in Cate's closet, emerging after sunset with a bra on his head. Muroid uses it to track him, even though he used to be afraid of bras when he was younger.

I'm sure he'd be afraid of the ample cleavages on display on Dracula's wives too, who appear in the back story of Count Catula, who used to be the official rat killer at Castle Dracula. Atwood has fun exploring back stories here and I get the feeling she'd have written three times as many pages just to do more of that. She only had so much space though and there needs to be plenty of time for a mass brawl between the half-cats and a detachment of Muroid's Murine rats. There is room enough for a set of cultural references that would go over the heads of child readers. Catula quotes Blake and Wilde. Catullus names the stray cat Fog from the Carl Sandberg poem.

In short, there's a lot here to enjoy, even if the story is almost nonexistent. None of what Atwood achieves as a writer ties to story. It's all tied to humour and character and, well, puns. I never expected the author of 'The Handmaid's Tale' to be such an incorrigible punster, but I'm not going to complain! Johnnie Christmas is the artist tasked with bringing all this to life and he has a blast this time out. Everything's ramped up from the first book, ably aided by a glorious colour palette from Tamra Bonvillain, but he has characters to get his teeth into as well. His art plays along with Atwood's humour perfectly. It was cheesy in the first book. It's a joyous riot in the second.

And so I'll wrap up next month with 'The Catbird Roars'. Hopefully having to tie up the loose story won't diminish the fun. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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