Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol BirchDoubleday (Random House), 2011 (Originally Canongate)

Books that are “writerly” or self-consciously “literary” in certain ways really appeal to me, and part of what I enjoyed about Jamrach’s Menagerie is that writerly charm. First, there’s the prose: it’s lush, detailed, descriptive, full of place, of weather, of sound, of slants of light. It’s beautiful (though there are also, you should be warned, stretches where it’s vivid but unlovely, stomach-turning, even). Then there’s the self-consciousness of the narrative as story: it’s partly just that it’s narrated in the first person, but it’s more than that, too: Jaffy Brown, our narrator, is concerned with the process of telling his story, and also with what kind of a story it is, and what kind of a story life in general is, if one can generalize.

The first lines of the book are like a spell being cast, like a fairy tale, the kind of sentences that made me want to curl up and settle in and not move for a good long while. Jaffy starts his story thus: “I was born twice. First in a wooden room that jutted over the black water of the Thames, and then again eight years later in the Highway, when the tiger took me in his mouth and everything truly began” (2). (The crazy thing, by the way, is that this incredible image, an escaped tiger taking a boy in its mouth in a busy London road—and the boy living—is drawn from fact: I learned this from this post over at Buried in Print; the Doubleday American edition of the book unfortunately omits the Acknowledgments section that the Canongate UK edition apparently had.) So: we see Jaffy as a child, a poor boy in London in the latter half of the 1800s. We see the filth and industry of Bermondsey (the tanning factory, the sludgy river), but loveliness too: the “air over the river though was full of sound and rain”; a ship is “a vision of beauty: a great wonder, a tall and noble three-masted clipper bringing tea from India, bearing down upon the Pool of London, where a hundred ships lay resting like pure-bred horses getting groomed, renewed, readied, soothed and calmed for the great sea trial to come” (4). We see the tiger: Jaffy’s out running an errand one day when a tiger appears in the street. He pats its nose; it knocks him over and picks him up. The tiger’s owner, Charles Jamrach, frees Jaffy, cages the tiger, brings Jaffy home, smooths things over. He takes Jaffy to see the whole menagerie, when he’s up for it, then offers him a job. Jaffy works at the menagerie for several years: he’s good with the animals, and likes them, and likes their wildness.

Then comes greater adventure still: Jamrach is commissioned to acquire a “dragon” for a wealthy customer; Jaffy’s friend Tim, who works in Jamrach’s menagerie too, is invited to go along with Jamrach’s friend/associate Dan Rymer, who catches many of the exotic creatures Jamrach sells. Jaffy, of course, decides he’s got to go, too. And so they all ship out on a whaling ship the wealthy customer owns, Dan and Tim and Jaffy, Dan an experienced sailor and Tim and Jaffy learning. It’s a quest; it’s an adventure; everything is possibility: in the Azores, Jaffy sees the world that isn’t London, and realizes how much world there is: I loved this bit, the expansiveness of it:

I don’t have to go home, I thought. I can go anywhere. The world’s endless. I could live here. I could live anywhere. It doesn’t have to be the Highway and the river and Spoony’s and Meng’s. I could live on a mountain. In a jungle. Where it’s all flowers. Miles of distance and nothing sure and nothing the same. (82)

The ship makes its way to Indonesia; the dragon, it turns out, is a Komodo dragon, no fire-breathing thing but a beast to be reckoned with nevertheless. And then what started as an adventure turns into a survival story, or maybe a cautionary tale: “If there is anything to be learned from my story perhaps it is this: never go to sea with a madman,” says Jaffy, at one point (175). There are calamities; there’s a storm. Things get gruesome; things get desperate. Jaffy nearly goes mad, or does go mad, a bit; everyone does. But Jaffy makes it back to London—we know this from the start; he’s telling the story from London—and though he’s traumatized, he eventually finds himself a home, a place, a calling. And the story, or life? It’s everything, it’s a muddle, it’s random: “There are turnings and twistings, a tangle of wool that needs sorting out and winding into a ball, but I ain’t doing it. It’s broth, all sorts thrown in and floating, the things that don’t fit, lost things, offshoots” (284). It’s what you make, or don’t, or it’s what’s given, and what you make or don’t of that:

“A hand is dealt,” he said. “You take it”
I felt I ought to speak: “And that is my duty?”
“It is.” (278)