The year of the rat

‘Ah,’ Robert Sullivan exclaims in this artful book, ‘the excitement, the nail-biting and palpably semi-wild thrill of ratting in the city!’ An otherwise apparently sane American writer and journalist, Sullivan chose to spend four seasons observing the rats in New York’s Eden’s Alley, five blocks from Broadway. Settling down with night-vision binoculars, a folding chair and a thermos, he catalogued the behaviour of ‘his’ rats as they scuttled over soot-peppered ice or foraged through bags of restaurant detritus literally fuming in the volcanic heat of a New York summer. His aim, he said, was ‘to arrive at some truth about rats’.

The book that emerged embraces all aspects of Rattus norvegicus. Besides purveying biological data of the sexual habits variety, Sullivan discourses on the history of rats as vectors, examining rat-borne plagues from the mediaeval period onwards (a case was reported in New York in 2002). He dutifully voyaged away from his alley to learn about rats at conferences all over the United States, and he talked at length to sanitation workers, exterminators and pest control officers — ‘the philosopher-kings of the rat-infested world’.