The Elephant - Hardcover

Rayner, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224030051 ISBN 13: 9780224030052

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 1991

Synopsis

The Elephant is Bradford, and 'a dream of a department store at the top of a hill so vertiginously steep it seems the whole building must break loose and roll down at any moment'. It is a man in the death business, and it is also his son, a self-confessed fantasist and liar who is named after a cricket field. It is about George Gershwin and The Beatles and a bonfire on the beach. About sleeping in coffins, Tetley bitter-men, the evil Schenk, a jar of pickled birds, cycling to Blackpool and back in 1931 and, fifty years later, 'sprinting down the prom at Scarborough acting how Fred Trueman put the frighteners on the Indians', had them 0 for 4 old man, oops, there goes another bouncer'. The Elephant has a dangerous wardrobe and a pearl lost in a game of marbles. It has a suave bad man called Charlie Laughton and a mad one called Twiggy Fawcett 'who carried no flesh on his bones and whose skeletal frame stalked moonilt cemetries with a spade filling in graves which had been dug in advance.; It is about versions of the truth, the mystery of names, sexual hysteria and a fear of not-feeling; about myths of family, of seduction, and of provincial England. Most of all, perhaps, it is about emotional change, and about going to see the elephant, and that in tuhnr is a story of the relationship between a son, Headingly, and his prodigal father, Jack Hamer.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Rayner was born in Yorkshire and educated in Bradford, in North Wales, and at Cambridge. He is the author of Los Angeles Without a Map, runner-up for the 1988 Sunday Express Book of the Year Prize.

Edition details

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0224030051
• ISBN 13: 9780224030052
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 276