Carol Birch’s Booker-longlisted novel will delight anyone who’s read Dickens or Melville or any of their contemporary imitators and wants a cross between a Bildungsroman and a good old adventure yarn. Or at least it will for the first half of the book anyway.
The narrator, Jaffy Brown, a mix of Oliver Twist, Ishmael and Crusoe, begins the story with his second birth in 1857, when, aged eight years old, he’s rescued from the jaws of a tiger that’s broken loose in the East End of London. The tiger belongs to Mr Jamrach, a man who makes his money by capturing and importing exotic animals for those who are beginning to fall under the sway of Darwin. To compensate him for his brush with death, Jamrach gives Jaffy a menial job in the menagerie, where Jaffy’s emotional empathy with the animals is soon noted. Jaffy befriends Tim, a slightly older helper, and grows besotted with Tim’s sister, Ishbel, though little comes of it save a kiss when he and Tim embark as part of one of Jamrach’s missions a few years later.
The mission is to travel to Indonesia and trap a komodo dragon, but en route they must also function as a whaling ship, a fact which gives Birch the chance to pay well-executed homage to Melville and include descriptions of poetic brevity: flying fish, for example, ‘skim the waves, rainbows flying from their backs’, while the wind ‘bats’ the ship along ‘like a cat with a ball of wool’. Where the homage to Melville is less successful is in the character Skip, a half-mad sailor whose debt to Melville’s Pip is too obvious, signalled even in the rhyme, and makes it too easy to guess that he’ll play a major part in the downfall of the crew.
Once the crew land in Indonesia, they discover a group of dragons in a ‘mess … like eels slipping wormily over one another’, and eventually capture one. This moment of triumph signals the onset of disaster. For once the dragon is on board, the sailors realise it’s an animal beyond their comprehension. With echoes of Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, time seems to slow and lethargy settles over everyone, the crew’s energies reserved for arguing whether the creature will be their fortune or damnation. In the end, it proves the latter. The dragon escapes and, shortly after, the ship sinks in a storm, leaving only a few survivors adrift in two lifeboats.
It’s at this point that, for me at least, the novel runs into trouble. After the fast-paced opening half, the second half of the novel feels becalmed, with chapter after chapter detailing the slow demise of the crew and their abandonment of hope. There are still times when Birch surprises the reader here with an observation that rings uncomfortably true, such as when Jaffy and his shipmates, already resigned to cannibalism, eye a fever-struck colleague expectantly, anticipating their next meal and Jaffy’s final moral dilemma is also moving.
However, two things work against the narrative here. One is the over-detailed descriptions of the deaths of minor characters. The other is the narrative voice – no matter how much Jaffy/Birch tries to inject a sense of tension, the first-person voice is a constant whisper beneath the text, an assurance that there’s no need to get excited because everything will be alright for Jaffy in the end. Melville, of course, got round this in Moby-Dick by drowning Ishmael’s voice beneath a third-person narrative at times, so when we see Moby Dick smash the Pequod to pieces, we almost forget that this narrative is still tied to a voice. Bereft of Melville’s encyclopaedic range, Birch can’t do the same, and this robs Jaffy’s survival of some of the thrill it should carry.
I shan’t spoil the ending of the novel and what Jaffy does when he returns to London, only to say that its borrowing from Great Expectations is clear and, again, a little too predictable. But reading it, you get an insight into the problem that the fine writing and often vivid imagination never quite solve. For this is an adventure novel that too closely resembles the structure of an actual expedition– the first half is a journey into the unknown, full of wonder and excitement; the second half is a return to the familiar, all the things we’re sure we’ve seen before.