Jamrach's Menagerie [Kindle Edition]

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.

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.

Slow burn historical travel tale that eventually explodes into gory horror.

This novel is the story of Jaffy Brown, a sailor and naturalist in Victorian London. A number of exciting incidents including shipwreck, attack by wild animals and whaling are described in an involving and detailed first person narration.

Despite being packed with incident, the story is slow paced. Even the earliest parts of the book, describing Jaffy's childhood are unhurried, the ship-board passages are almost static. The characters themselves draw the reader's attention to this : "Skip..said..."We've gone into dragon time."...It was true, something had changed, as if we'd sailed into a different air."(p179)

This slow development only makes the eventual crisis more shocking.

The fictional search for Komodo Dragons, quite plausible, is fascinating. It makes an interesting contrast with David Attenborough's real life account of his search for the Dragons, a short 100 years or so later. Strange to think that Jaffy's Dragon could well have survived, ancient and huge, to see Attenborough and his film crew.

"Jamrach's Menagerie" is a well written and invoving book, although readers should be aware it is, inevitably, a difficult and grisly read at times. The short afterword describing which elements of the story are based on real life incidents is surprising.