As much as life would appear to be a series of experiences chained together by familiar environments and occurrences, friends and attitudes, it is, at root, the gestalt of billions of choices that are as unquantifiable as they are immeasurable. Most of these decision points are numbingly mundane, having long since fallen into the rhythm of automatic reflex. And yet, others are so consequential, so profound, that they leave one's existence unfathomably altered. This can be for good or ill, but it is most certainly one of the two, a reality that gives extra significance to hindsight and regret. If nothing else, Carol Birch's novel demonstrates this in engaging detail.
Born in the east end of Victorian London, little Jaffy Brown was facing a grim future. The son of a working-poor mother and a father in the wind, he was a prime target to become a statistic, another victim of the merciless, Dickensien England of the 19th century. But then, when he was but eight years old, an encounter with a tiger that had escaped from the cages of Charles jamrach, famed naturalist, transformed his mundane existence into one of adventure and opportunity. For being exposed to jamrach's animals not only landed him a new friend, Tim, and a girl to love, Tim's sister, it opened up his world to the possibilities of science and the sea, the latter of which he wholeheartedly embraced.
Added to a crew hired to fetch a fabled dragon from Asian shores, Jaffy and Tim, now teenagers, set out on a grand adventure, imagining that they'll return home if not heroes then certainly in the good graces of their employer, Jamrach. But when a series of calamities strikes the expedition, they are compelled to re-evaluate not only their choices and their friendships, but their ethics and their futures. For fate and fortune have turned against them and all that's left is the desperate need to survive.
A vivid, sea-stained yarn of endurance and fortitude in the face of catastrophe, Jamrach's Menagerie is a rocky, uneven experience. Ms. Birch is an accomplished storyteller who demonstrates as much skill capturing the joys and the hardships of the sea as she does in crafting the voices of her characters who remain pleasingly human in the face of extraordinary circumstances. But while her tale is buoyed by these virtues, along with moments of explosive beauty and violence, it is profoundly weighed down by long stretches of listless inactivity that left this reader feeling suffocated and repulsed.
Jamrach's Menagerie sports some unforgettable moments. Several encounters with legendary creatures of the sea are taut with tension, the reader forced to look helplessly on as Jaffy, the narrator, is overwhelmed by situations he could've never practiced for, much less appreciated the gravity of. These incidents are heart-wrenching, not just because they imperil our protagonists, but because they memorably capture the unimaginable violence inherent in whaling, a practice that would have driven the species to extinction had humanity not found, and properly exploited, other sources of oil.
And yet, as much as one is floored by these riveting passages, they are far and few between, brilliant spots of brightness amidst an otherwise featureless sea of suffering and degradation. Which leads us to the novel's gravest flaw. For other than casting the practice of whaling in a more violent light, Ms. Birch makes not a single, novel contribution to the genre in whose waters her novel wades. Dozens of classics on this very salty subject have been penned, works that seek to so grievously test the wills of their actors that normal, for them, becomes a distant and unachievable memory. And while that should not in any way preclude Ms. Birch from writing her own account, it does compel her to advance the genre in some way, to bring something new to the sea-voyage maptable. She has sadly failed to do so.
A disappointment. For a work long-listed for several awards, I expected far more. But unoriginality and lethargy doomed the work beyond repair. (2/5 Stars)
As much as life would appear to be a series of experiences chained together by familiar environments and occurrences, friends and attitudes, it is, at root, the gestalt of billions of choices that are as unquantifiable as they are immeasurable. Most of these decision points are numbingly mundane, having long since fallen into the rhythm of automatic reflex. And yet, others are so consequential, so profound, that they leave one's existence unfathomably altered. This can be for good or ill, but it is most certainly one of the two, a reality that gives extra significance to hindsight and regret. If nothing else, Carol Birch's novel demonstrates this in engaging detail.
Born in the east end of Victorian London, little Jaffy Brown was facing a grim future. The son of a working-poor mother and a father in the wind, he was a prime target to become a statistic, another victim of the merciless, Dickensien England of the 19th century. But then, when he was but eight years old, an encounter with a tiger that had escaped from the cages of Charles jamrach, famed naturalist, transformed his mundane existence into one of adventure and opportunity. For being exposed to jamrach's animals not only landed him a new friend, Tim, and a girl to love, Tim's sister, it opened up his world to the possibilities of science and the sea, the latter of which he wholeheartedly embraced.
Added to a crew hired to fetch a fabled dragon from Asian shores, Jaffy and Tim, now teenagers, set out on a grand adventure, imagining that they'll return home if not heroes then certainly in the good graces of their employer, Jamrach. But when a series of calamities strikes the expedition, they are compelled to re-evaluate not only their choices and their friendships, but their ethics and their futures. For fate and fortune have turned against them and all that's left is the desperate need to survive.
A vivid, sea-stained yarn of endurance and fortitude in the face of catastrophe, Jamrach's Menagerie is a rocky, uneven experience. Ms. Birch is an accomplished storyteller who demonstrates as much skill capturing the joys and the hardships of the sea as she does in crafting the voices of her characters who remain pleasingly human in the face of extraordinary circumstances. But while her tale is buoyed by these virtues, along with moments of explosive beauty and violence, it is profoundly weighed down by long stretches of listless inactivity that left this reader feeling suffocated and repulsed.
Jamrach's Menagerie sports some unforgettable moments. Several encounters with legendary creatures of the sea are taut with tension, the reader forced to look helplessly on as Jaffy, the narrator, is overwhelmed by situations he could've never practiced for, much less appreciated the gravity of. These incidents are heart-wrenching, not just because they imperil our protagonists, but because they memorably capture the unimaginable violence inherent in whaling, a practice that would have driven the species to extinction had humanity not found, and properly exploited, other sources of oil.
And yet, as much as one is floored by these riveting passages, they are far and few between, brilliant spots of brightness amidst an otherwise featureless sea of suffering and degradation. Which leads us to the novel's gravest flaw. For other than casting the practice of whaling in a more violent light, Ms. Birch makes not a single, novel contribution to the genre in whose waters her novel wades. Dozens of classics on this very salty subject have been penned, works that seek to so grievously test the wills of their actors that normal, for them, becomes a distant and unachievable memory. And while that should not in any way preclude Ms. Birch from writing her own account, it does compel her to advance the genre in some way, to bring something new to the sea-voyage maptable. She has sadly failed to do so.
A disappointment. For a work long-listed for several awards, I expected far more. But unoriginality and lethargy doomed the work beyond repair. (2/5 Stars)
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