Jamrach's Menagerie (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

The opening chapter of this book is glorious reminder of the power of a good yarn in the right hands. A young boy meets an escaped tiger on the streets on east London and his life is transformed. With each subsequent chapter the story just gets more compelling. I haven't read a more enjoyable book in years.

Like the best Victorian novels it follows a boy's life through to old age, and on the way recounts the most extraordinary voyage. After his encounter with the tiger, our hero Jaffy takes on work for its owner, Mr Jamrach - traveller, menagerie-owner and purveyor of the world's strangest creatures. This work soon involves a commission to procure a creature for Jamrach that may or may not exist, a so-called sea dragon that is recorded as living in the Indian Ocean. So Jaffy's voyage begins, and seems to be going very well. But then fate's winds blow in another direction.

It has all the verbal energy of The Ryme of the Ancient Mariner, with the storytelling nous of Joseph O'Connor. Like a great David Attenborough film it takes you right up close to nature, whether the whiskers of Bengal tiger, the spout of a whale or the snapping jaws of a komodo dragon. But best of all it explores the wildness within our own species and asks what circumstances might see that laid bare.

A stunning piece of fiction from a writer at the top of her game. I must read more Birch.

Carol Birch is not a writer I have come across previously, but I am immensely grateful to have finally bumped into her work- her brilliant evocations of both the grimy, tough life of 19th century working-classs London and then the harshness of life on the ocean waves are vivid, rich and addictively more-ish.

Coupled with Birch's ability to spin an excellent yarn peopled by loveable, cheeky, yet frail characters, Jamrach's Menagerie is a reading feast. It's a novel which takes you on a classic, gothic adventure to the ends of the Earth, whilst exploring the essence of what it means to be human.

This novel is a treat, and is almost imppossible to put down once you've set sail on the search for the ever-so-rare Komodo dragon.

I was pleasantly surprised by this one. After reading other nominees for the Orange Prize, I was expecting more dull worthiness, but Carol Birch proves that women's fiction doesn't have to be about wistful librarians swilling camomile tea.

The novel begins in the grotty sewers of nineteenth century London, where we meet the hero, Jaffy Brown. Following a chance encounter with an escaped tiger, Jaffy gains work as a yard boy for the tiger's repentant owner; the eponymous Mr Jamrach, an importer of exotic animals. Jaffy proves to be a gifted animal handler and is sent on a mission to capture a `dragon' in the East Indies. Naturally, all does not go according to plan, leaving Jaffy lost at sea with a group of increasingly desperate shipmates.

One of the strengths for me is the sense of place and time this book conveys; it succeeds in vividly bringing to life a time when the world still contained such mystery and adventure that it was possible to believe in dragons, and surviving a sea voyage was more a matter of chance than GPS. (Of course, from a privileged 21st century perspective, we can sneer that a Komodo dragon is merely a big lizard, but that's not the point).

However, this technique works best when describing the characters' adventures on land, first in London and later during exotic port forays along the way. This causes the second half of the book to suffer, as the bulk of the narrative takes place on a marooned vessel in the open ocean. Although initially dramatic, this section was so drawn out I ended up hoping the whole lot of them would pitch overboard.

The quality of the author's prose style is also (perversely) an occasional sticking point: it is so evocative and visceral that I found several scenes featuring whaling and other animal abuse pretty hard to take. Be advised, this is not a book to read at breakfast!

The ending is something of a fizzler, sadly, leaving some character's riddles unsolved, whilst others tie up too neatly. All in all, though, a good escapist read, and the cover art's pretty swanky too. If the whole thing had been as good as the first part, I'd have given it more stars, but sadly the later noodling sections let it down.