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Elephantasy >> The White Bone is no Dumbo
by JULIET WATERS
In the matriarchal and elephacentric culture, there is no word for fatherhood. Elephant bulls are not thought to be co-conceivers of life--their only contribution to birth is in digging the calf tunnel, and sometimes it's necessary for an elephant cow to be mounted by several bulls in succession before she feels she has been "truly dug." The bull credited with having given her this feeling is also credited with having provided a tunnel spacious enough for a calf to sprout in, and becomes the closest thing to the calf's father. Humans are known as "hindleggers," and are believed to be fallen elephants. Ten thousand years ago, in a time known as "the descent," a starving bull and cow killed and ate a gazelle, breaking the first and most sacred law: thou shall eat no creature living or dead. Even before they had finished their meal, they began to shrink. As their bodies grew smaller and thinner, their trunks receded into stubs, their ears contracted and fur sprouted on top of their heads. They rose up on their legs to protest, but only a weak howl came from their throats. Damned to walk upright in ceaseless rage, these hindleggers declared themselves carnivores, free to prey on any four-legged creature. Gowdy, best known for "Kissed," her controversial short story about necrophilia, is probably one of the most talented, if unawarded, Canadian novelists. When The White Bone came out in hardcover last fall, she was once again nominated for every major Canadian award, and once more failed to win any. But despite her quirky, sexy persona, The White Bone, now out in paperback, is a serious, impressive book. It's not her first foray into fantasy fiction. Her last book, Mr Sandman, opened with the birth of a reincarnated deaf mute who greeted the world with her first and last words: "Oh no. Not again." In that novel, Gowdy created what one reviewer described as a "differently functional family," in which the parents were two repressed homosexuals trying to fake their way through the '50s. In The White Bone, Gowdy has let her lurid but charming imagination loose to create a "differently functional" species. A world dominated by elephants is, of course, a world dominated by smell. Elephants can distinguish not only the species of any piece of dung, but also the age--to the day--of any dropping. But it's also a world dominated by intense memory. As Gowdy writes, "every odour they have ever sucked into their trunks, every flicker of sunlight they have ever doused with their tremendous shadows is preserved inside them as a perfect and instantly retrievable moment." Their memory is their blessing and their curse--they are doomed without it. And they are tragically sentimental. Their hearts are broken by any kind of loss or yearning. Africa, from an elephant's point of view, is a virtual Cambodia. Brought to the point of extinction by the ivory trade, the life of an elephant is one of desperate survival. Gowdy takes the reader into the world of one small, barely functioning family in flight from a band of hunting hindleggers. While there is tenderness, love and humour in her latest novel, it has more in common with The Killing Fields than Dumbo. Still, even though The White Bone is a brutally realistic novel, it's too fiercely imaginative to be depressing. It is beautifully written and unique. A novel even a hindlegger will have a hard time forgetting.
The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy, Harper Perennial, pb, 329 pp, $18.95 |
In The White Bone, her strangest and darkest novel yet, Barbara Gowdy imagines the world from the point of view of the African elephant. Or, more specifically, from the point of view of a society of fierce, warped, eccentric African elephants.