Will Byrnes's Reviews > Water for Elephants

Ladies and gentlemen. Direct your attention to the performer in print. You will be amazed, dazzled and mystified by the daring feats you are about to witness. Well, that might be overstating a bit. The story does open with drama, though. A circus menagerie has gotten loose and there is mayhem. The narrator, Jacob, sees the ringmaster murdered. We then scoot ahead to the present. Jacob is in his 90s and looks back, revisiting his ghosts. From here, we flip back and forth between Jacob in the present and his recollections.

When Jacob is 23, his parents are killed in an auto mishap, leaving him penniless. He drops out of veterinary school, just shy of completion, and when the freight train he hops turns out to be transporting a circus he finds himself in a new life.


Sara Gruen image from The Globe and Mail

There is unkindness aplenty under the big top. An evil owner, Uncle Al, Blackie the enforcer, August, the mood-challenged and abusive supervisor of animals, and husband of Marlena, who performs with horses, and with whom Jacob is smitten. But for every cruelty there is kindness. Jacob is helped by the elderly alcoholic, Camel, when he is newly on the bum and Jacob later returns the favor. A grumpy dwarf named Walter shows a kinder side, in time.

What is real and what is an illusion? Gruen offers us a major sleight of hand that I will not write of here. But there are sundry references throughout the book. A circus, per se, is involved in the business of illusion. There is a wonderful image here of a hippo being paraded through town, even though it has already gone to meet its maker. Some relationships in the story are based on illusion as well.

But the core items here are Jacob’s love for the married Marlena, and the behavior of a newly acquired elephant, who may not be as dumb as she at first appears. While both tales are engaging, I did find the pacing to be somewhat slow. Thankfully, this is a very fast read. I know, that sounds contradictory, but one can flip through the pages quickly while waiting for something to happen. Gruen does a nice job of making her characters real, a wonderful gift.

I have no idea if Gruen had any intention of making political observations, but here are a few things one might see in her work. One gruesome practice engaged in by Uncle Al and his thugs is redlighting, or tossing employees from a moving train. Think of it as a pink slip on steroids. In the Depression era of the story, as in ours, there are plenty who would be more than happy to toss those of us on the lower echelon, let alone their mamas, from a moving train. Is Uncle Al the ultimate Republican? Class comes in for a look. The roustabouts, the working men, are treated far differently from the performers and from management. The class system is sealed in place. When times are tough, for instance, performers and managers are paid, but the roustabouts are often stiffed. I know that reminds me of soaring corporate profits while unemployment remains high. When one is physically damaged, management does its best to either dump the unwell, or find some darker use for them. Caring for the sick is clearly not something that is done here, at least not for the workers. Housing is distributed somewhat unequally as well.

In order to accommodate less than a dozen performers, we will now have sixty-four working men sleeping under wagons on the flats. (p 131)

You have to figure that any story featuring a character named Jacob should have a ladder, and indeed there are a few, but I did not see any particular heavenly references there. And if one is looking for classical cues, one might find that in Genesis 25:27 the biblical Jacob is a “dweller in tents.” Ok, it’s not much. Is there a parallel with the story of that earlier Jacob? Maybe, but if so it did not really jump out at me.

While Water for Elephants may not be the greatest book on earth, it is a very engaging and entertaining page turner. I would not confuse this with books with great literary ambition. It is what it is, a darned good read, and that is good enough to perform in the center ring.

PS - I suggest you take a peek at the review by GR pal, Petergiaquinta. He has a much better handle on the whole biblical reference thing, and some nice non-biblical insights beyond.

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Twitter, and FB pages