- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: Picador USA; First Printing edition (Jun 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0312264127
- ISBN-13: 978-0312264123
- Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 14 x 2.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,183,838 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Barbara Gowdy has an utter affinity for the unconventional. In the title story of We So Seldom Look On Love, necrophilia is exquisite rather than execrable, and her wildly funny--and wildly affecting--novel Mister Sandman invites us into the hearts and minds of Toronto's least normal and most loving family. With The White Bone Gowdy continues her exploration of extraordinary lives, but this time human beings ("hindleggers") are on the periphery. And we're grateful when they're not around, as this gives her four-legged characters--elephants--a chance to survive.
The White Bone opens with five family trees. Gowdy's pachyderms include an orphaned visionary, She-Spurns (more familiarly known as Mud) and the "fine-scenter" She-Deflates, not to mention nurse cow She-Soothes and the bull Tall Time. (Though Gowdy's nomenclature may displease some readers, Dumbo wasn't exactly an inspiring name either.) Then, before her tragic narrative even begins, Gowdy offers a second feat of empathy and imagination, a glossary of elephant language. Afflicted by premonitions and obsessed with memory and safety, these animals have terms that range from the formal to the low, the metaphorical to the deeply physical: the "Eternal Shoreless Water" is oblivion, a "sting" is a bullet and a "flow-stick" a snake. Of course, if you have a"trunk," you possess "soulfulness, depth of spirit"--something every participant in Gowdy's fourth novel desperately needs. Initially, her characters' impressions of familiar objects are amusing, but bright comedy precedes dark tragedy. Witness Mud's take on jeeps: "On their own, vehicles prefer to sleep, but whenever a human burrows inside them they race and roar and discharge a foul odour." Needless to say, such speeding tends to precede a killing fest.
Alas, this is a book heavy with omens and slaughter, and Gowdy makes each elephant so individual, so conscious, that their separate fates are impossible to bear. When Tall Time, for instance, hears a helicopter, nothing, not even Gowdy's poetry, can save him: "The shots that pelt his hide feel as light as rain. It is bewildering to be brought down under their little weight." As the devastation increases, and her characters fail, and fail again, to find the magical white bone that should lead them to safety, the novel becomes a litany of pain and death. The only success is Barbara Gowdy's, in getting so thoroughly under the skin of her elephantine protagonists. --Kerry Fried --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
‘The White Bone dramatises its creatures with what is both affection and a kind of mournful desperation. This is, afterall, a story of a species hunted nearly to its end. What saves it from archness is a vein of stunning and melancholy lyricism married to brutality. Images in Gowdy’s fiction sear themselves, moving or terrible, maddeningly unforgettable, onto the reader’s brain.’
Scotsman
‘Inspired imagination and research have created a marvel of a book. In The White Bone, the language, social structure, intellectual and spritiual world of elephants are as real as the fabric of human life. Absolutely compelling.’
Alice Munro
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is one of the most anthropomorphic books this side of a Disney cartoon. If you can suspend your disbelief for a moment, let yourself drift into a world of elephant theology and brutish survival in a hard world full of drought and poachers. Beautiful writing, and believable.
If you don't like it, you'll REALLY not like it.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The reader is transported into an unfamiliar yet evocative landscape and made to view things through the eyes of elephants. The author has created a fascinating yet believable universe filled with sympathetic creatures with their unique social structure, world view and beliefs, all trying desperately to understand the slaughter of their kind.
'The White Bone' is beautifully written. The language of the animals are a delight to read. Elephants speak in a formal timbre, birds of prey are taciturn and aloof, mangooses twitter repetitively. The elephants call snakes 'flow sticks', the ostrich is a 'big fly', the zebra is called 'ribs' (because in an earlier incarnation its skeleton covered its flesh), 'rouge's web' are wire fences put up by humans and the helicopters used to hunt them are 'roar flies' .
Not a simple act of creativity, the author based her book on work done by animal behaviourists, showing how elephants are intelligent creatures, how they live in matriarchal groups, how they communicate, how they mourn their dead, etc.
If the tragedy of the elephants do not move you, nothing will. Highly recommended.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a wonderful book that takes you right into the world of elephants... but it's not so 'way out' that you have to suspend belief, for me the transition from real world to that of Mud and her family was made effortless by Gowdy's skillful writing. I was however pleased to see the references to zoological texts at the back of the book, it somehow made the book all the more amazing given that there is scientific basis for some of the characteristics and skills with which Gowdy endows her elephants...
A highly unusual book - poles apart from e.g. her other book "The Romantic" and a real must buy. I lent it to one of my friends - after reading it she went out and bought copies for her friends too!
Overall recommendation: BUY!!!
A highly unusual book - poles apart from e.g. her other book "The Romantic" and a real must buy. I lent it to one of my friends - after reading it she went out and bought copies for her friends too!
Overall recommendation: BUY!!!
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Be an elephant, and rediscover your humanity
Elephants, death, birth, family, visions, friendship, loss, prophesy, crisis and the search for peace and redemption, delivered to you in prose as clean and sweet as the African... Read more
Published on 8 May 2004 by Mr Peter M Worthington
Universe of Elephants
I am crazy about Barbara Gowdy. "Mr. Sandman" is one of the best books I have ever read. She can get away with things that would alienate me with other authors. Read more
Published on 26 Oct 1998
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