The late, great Ursula K. Le Guin once said, “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and … even imagine real grounds for hope.” Maine writer Bill Roorbach has taken up the imaginative challenge. His new novel, “Beep,” offers a classic “hero liberates the oppressed, finds true love and saves the world” journey. But in this story, our hero is an irrepressible squirrel monkey named Beep.

Beep is on a quest to find a mate, which requires leaving his home and family in the Costa Rican rain forest. He’s an outsized charmer and wise beyond his years: a naif who manages to fulfill a prophecy and upend humanity’s catastrophic dominion. But first, he must scale new trees, leaving behind everything he’s ever known:

Local review

“Beep”
By Bill Roorbach
Algonquin Books
$28

“I, Beep, saw into the next valley. And then past it, though a gap unimaginably far away, a kind of vision: the hills that the old ones said came before mountains. The great fig was the furthest place I’d ever been, the furthest I could go and still know how to get back to my troupe. I could still hear the chiding of my sisters and cousins, my mother cross and rejecting, the useless gossip of the old uncles, the insults of the new males, nattering fops and dandies arriving every day.

“Well, goodbye to all that.”

Fatefully, Beep crosses paths with an 11-year-old human, Inga. Hunger and some pineapple wedges draw them together, but they quickly develop an understanding, communicating thanks to Beep’s quick wit and Inga’s sensitive nature.

Roorbach has great fun with language here. In his native dialect, Beep speaks in sophisticated, even formal dialogue – which Inga hears as monkey chatter. Through trial and error, each learns something of the other’s expressions. Beep’s acquisition of English is scattershot and playful: humans are “you-mens,” a zoo is a “prizzon,” love is “wub.” Despite what’s lost in translation, Beep’s outsider perspective gives him keen insight into the strangeness and alienation of the human-built world.

And the human-built world is hurting. Beep experiences it first in the loss of his habitat to encroaching development – but this loss is dwarfed by the scale of displacement and exploitation he encounters on his quest.

After accidentally stowing away on Inga’s journey back to Manhattan with her family, Beep wakes to cacophony: “ …the world was all noise, goers galore it sounded, some kind of non-animal screaming and hooting, also aggressively non-Beep beeping, non-bird honking… .”

Beep is the proverbial fish out of water (or monkey out of the rain forest) – but as any urban dweller will attest, there’s plenty of wildlife to be found in cities. As an innocent abroad, Beep has amusing interactions with squirrels (who function as a hive-mind, the charming conduits of gossip and news in the animal world), rats, trees, a tasty slug and a depressed, jaded band of Japanese Macaques at the Central Park Zoo. All of them have heard the prophecy: a Freemonkey with the potential to save the world is on his way. Change is afoot, it’s no tall tail.

Fired up by a talk given by superstar environmentalist Greta Thunberg, Beep and Inga conspire to liberate the animals from the Bronx Zoo (aka the Bronzoo) – including a small group of squirrel monkeys, Beep’s best chance at reconnecting with his own kind.

As monkey wisdom has it, humans have set themselves apart from the world to disastrous results: “…the you-mens were once part of the intuitive concatenation, the interbraided hitherto— the monkey chain, we smalls liked to call it, the fulsome communication of all things living … it was the goers that separated themselves from the rest of the world … these overachieving stagger-clowns separating themselves from not only the true world but from themselves as well, creating the two kinds of you-mens, goers and growers; or maybe three, one old aunt liked to say. The third she called the sensitives, and these were those who still had monkey sense… .”

Inga, no surprise, is a sensitive. Gradually, she learns to communicate nonverbally, as Beep and other creatures do. Beep meets other human sensitives along the way, and they offer crucial support during high-stakes twists and turns. An extended scene of the storming and liberation of the Bronx Zoo clips along with propulsive, freewheeling energy, as newly liberated species work together to hold off the humans who would recapture them, led by the most fearsome mammals in the zoo.

Hmm, I margin-scribbled, not even one of these big predator cats is tempted to break ranks and have a quick snack – on a penguin? a warthog? a young girl? Where’s the wildness here? Thinking like a stagger-clown! Beep’s comrades work together in perfect solidarity because the prophecy foretells it – and their survival demands it. Roorbach packs his young hero’s journey with such winsome verve and exuberance, quibbles fall by the wayside.

Eventually Beep and his newfound partner, Deeps, travel south, encountering significant obstacles on their journey homeward. Just when you think “Beep” might be pulling too many punches, the novel takes a turn – how to resolve the atrocities of the Anthropocene? As prophesied, a herd culling is in order.

How Roorbach handles this is as low-key and nonviolent as any mass exit you’re ever likely to read – as quiet, say, as the disappearance of harlequin toads from the rain forest.

Humanity’s fate isn’t Beep’s focus – and Roorbach fans will find much to love in this big-hearted, simian-centered highwire act. Life continues in all its rich diversity, no species holding primacy over any other. If Inga someday awakens from the idyllic dream of this new world order, it’s an open question how she might feel about the losses entailed in the decline of Earth’s apex predator. But it’s a question Beep has no interest in answering. It’s his world now, we’re just living in it.

Genanne Walsh is the author of a novel, “Twister,” and a creative nonfiction chapbook, “Eggs in Purgatory.” She lives in Portland.