THE WHITE BONE - Softcover

Gowdy, Barbara

3.78

3,598 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007291574 ISBN 13: 9780007291571

Publisher: Flamingo, 2008

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A classic, moving quest of elephants, memory and the will to survive. Mud is an infant elephant, orphaned at birth and blessed with visionary powers. She and her adoptive family roam the plains of east Africa in search of water and food. At a crowded watering hole in a bad drought, ivory poachers find them and kill, or drive off, almost all of the elephant cows and their young. Mud, now an adolescent and pregnant with her first calf, sets out with the wounded and traumatized survivors in search of the injured. Guided by visions, memories and hallucinations as much as their incredible sense of smell, the ruined herd hears rumours of A Safe Place and the White Bone that can lead them there. The quest becomes one of endurance, sacrifice and, ultimately, transcendence, as the elephants struggle for their own lives and the continuation of their kind. Strikingly original, The White Bone takes Gowdy's talent for inspired characterization to new heights, allowing us to see the world afresh through the eyes of a constantly persecuted, and yet infinitely gentle species.

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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

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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