Jamrach's Menagerie

( 8 )

Overview


SHORTLISTED for the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction

A thrilling and powerful novel about a young boy lured to sea by the promise of adventure and reward, with echoes of Great Expectations, Moby-Dick, and The Voyage of the Narwhal.

Jamrach’s Menagerie tells the story of a nineteenth-century street urchin named Jaffy Brown. Following an incident with an escaped tiger, Jaffy goes to work for Mr. Charles ...

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Jamrach's Menagerie

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More About This Book

Overview


SHORTLISTED for the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction

A thrilling and powerful novel about a young boy lured to sea by the promise of adventure and reward, with echoes of Great Expectations, Moby-Dick, and The Voyage of the Narwhal.

Jamrach’s Menagerie tells the story of a nineteenth-century street urchin named Jaffy Brown. Following an incident with an escaped tiger, Jaffy goes to work for Mr. Charles Jamrach, the famed importer of exotic animals, alongside Tim, a good but sometimes spitefully competitive boy. Thus begins a long, close friendship fraught with ambiguity and rivalry.

Mr. Jamrach recruits the two boys to capture a fabled dragon during the course of a three-year whaling expedi­tion. Onboard, Jaffy and Tim enjoy the rough brotherhood of sailors and the brutal art of whale hunting. They even succeed in catching the reptilian beast.

But when the ship’s whaling venture falls short of expecta­tions, the crew begins to regard the dragon—seething with feral power in its cage—as bad luck, a feeling that is cruelly reinforced when a violent storm sinks the ship.

Drifting across an increasingly hallucinatory ocean, the sur­vivors, including Jaffy and Tim, are forced to confront their own place in the animal kingdom. Masterfully told, wildly atmospheric, and thundering with tension, Jamrach’s Mena­gerie is a truly haunting novel about friendship, sacrifice, and survival.

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Editorial Reviews

Ron Charles
â€Ĥa moving, fantastically exciting sea tale that takes you back to those great 19th-century stories that first convinced you "there is no frigate like a book"â€ĤOne of the magical qualities of Birch's story is that it gives [a] sense of Dickensian sprawl and scope even though it's spun in fewer than 300 pagesâ€ĤAnother wonderâ€Ĥis sweet Jaffy's dynamic voice, which evolves from the wide-eyed enthusiasms of boyhood to the weary melancholy of middle ageâ€ĤFor a new salty adventure across the watery part of the world, you won't find a better passage than Jamrach's Menagerie.
—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
This wracking maritime psychodrama follows a young boy from his humble beginnings as a child laborer in late 19th-century London to the South Pacific, finding bits of whimsy and beauty in a chaotic story. Jaffy Brown's bleak young life in the slums takes a bright turn when he is carried off by an escaped tiger and wins the notice of Charles Jamrach, a purveyor of exotic animals. Jamrach gives Jaffy a job, and soon the boy is sent on a years-long journey to the South Pacific, where he is supposed to find a dragon. It becomes slowly evident that the dragon quest, which is dispatched in an anticlimax, works as a macguffin for a dark and drifting tale of woe on the high seas as Jaffy's expedition is beset by disasters sinister and otherworldly. Birch's writing is assured and enticing, and she's especially talented at creating floating, still moments amid the action, often as Jaffy pauses to foreshadow or ruminate. Readers will spend much time wondering where this gratifyingly bizarre story is going, though Birch's writing chops do much to smooth the way. (June)
Library Journal
A young lad dashing through the streets of Victorian London runs smack into an escaped circus animal and nearly becomes its dinner. His rescuer regales him with stories of shipboard adventure, and soon our young hero finds himself bound for the South Seas. Birch is an award winner in Britain, and as this book is said to carry hints of Great Expectations, Moby-Dick, and Andrea Barrett's The Voyage of Narwhal, it is well worth watching.
Kirkus Reviews

A magical, literary novel puts a surreal spin on a coming-of-age seafaring saga.

Among the amazements of the 10th novel by the British, award-winning Birch is that it is the first to be published in America. Its narrator is a young boy named Jaffy Brown, who begs to be described as a Dickensian "street urchin," but whose life changes irrevocably after he encounters a tiger on a street near the Thames and proves uncommonly brave when the animal takes the boy into its mouth. The tiger belongs to Charles Jamrach, an importer of exotic animals who recruits Jaffy to go to sea on a whaling expedition that has a much more ambitious goal: to capture a dragon. Among his shipmates will be Tim, another boy with whom Jaffy bonds but who is very competitive, creating a tension complicated by Jaffy's attraction to Tim's sister.All of this is narrated in retrospect, decades later, after Jaffy has discovered how it feels to be "stuck between a mad God and merciless nature." Yet it retains a sense of childlike wonder in its lyrical prose, as the line between what Jaffy is experiencing and what he is dreaming blurs the longer he is at sea: "Nowhere clearer than the ocean for a bright state of being, of falling with constant clarity into the vortex inside...Sometimes it felt as if the stars out there, far from all land, were screaming. Hundreds of miles blaring at your head. So beautiful, that night, waking in the sky with the screaming stars all around." The ill-fated voyage finds the dragon haunting the young mariner much the same as the albatross did Coleridge's ancient mariner. Before it is over Jaffy will have his first taste of death. And worse. If prayer was the only passable path to salvation, Jaffy felt "it had become long sinceplain that God didn't answer. Not so's the average idiot could understand anyway."

Jaffy's experience could well move the reader as profoundly as it changed the narrator.

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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780307932396
  • Publisher: Books on Tape, Inc.
  • Publication date: 6/21/2011
  • Format: MP3
  • Edition description: Unabridged
  • Ships to U.S.and APO/FPO addresses only.

Meet the Author

CAROL BIRCH is the author of nine other novels published in Britain. She has won the David Higham Award for Life in the Palace and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for The Fog Line, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003 for Turn Again Home.
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Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

I was born twice. First in a wooden room that jutted out 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.

Say Bermondsey and they wrinkle their noses. Still, it was the home before all other homes. The river lapped beneath us as we slept. Our door looked out over a wooden rail into the channel at the front, where dark water heaved up an odd sullen grey bubble. If you looked down through the slats, you could see things moving in the swill below. Thick green slime, glistening in the slosh that banged up against it, crept up the crumbling wooden piles.

I remember the jagged lanes with bent elbows and crooked knees, rutted horse shit in the road, the dung of sheep that passed our house every day from the marshes and the cattle bellowing their unbearable sorrows in the tannery yard. I remember the dark bricks of the tanning factory, and the rain falling black. The wrinkled red bricks of the walls were gone all to tarry soot. If you touched them the tips of your fingers came away shiny black. A heavy smell came up from under the wooden bridge and got you in the gob as you crossed in the morning going to work.

The air over the river though was full of sound and rain. And sometimes at night the sound of sailors sang out over the winking water--voices wild and dark to me as the elements themselves--lilts from everywhere, strange tongues that lisped and shouted, melodies running up and down like many small flights of stairs, making me feel as if I was far away in those strange hot-sun places.

The river was a great thing seen from the bank, but a foul thing when your bare toes encountered the thin red worms that lived in its sticky mud. I remember them wriggling between.

But look at us.

Crawling up and down the new sewers like maggots ourselves, thin grey boys, thin grey girls, grey as the mud we walked in, splashing along the dark, round-mouthed tunnels that stank like hell. The sides were caked in crusty, black shit. Peeling out pennies and trying to fill our pockets, we wore our handkerchiefs over our noses and mouths, our eyes stang and ran. Sometimes we retched. It was something you did, like a sneeze or a belch. And when we came blinking out onto the foreshore, there we would see 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.

But our pockets were never full. I remember the gnawing in my belly, the hunger retch. That thing my body did nights when I lay in bed.

All of this was a long time ago. In those days my mother could easily have passed for a child. She was a small, tough thing with muscular shoulders and arms. When she walked she strode, swinging her arms from the shoulders. She was a laugh, my ma. She and I slept together in a truckle. We used to sing together getting off to sleep in that room over the river--a very pretty, cracked voice she had--but a man came sometimes, and then I had to go next door and kip in one end of a big tumbled old feather bed, with the small naked feet of very young children pushing up the blankets on either side of my head, and the fleas feasting on me.

The man that came to see my mother wasn't my father. My father was a sailor who died before I was born, so Ma said, but she never said much. This...

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Customer Reviews

Average Rating 3.5
( 8 )
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Sort by: Showing all of 8 Customer Reviews

  • Anonymous

    Posted February 20, 2013

    Great story

    Lyrical and heartbreaking. May be my #2 of last year. Grumpy, dissatisfied peolpe should read this so they'll realize what ungrateful, cynical a-holes they are.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 22, 2013

    Horrible, don't waste your time!

    Had great potential, took a turn for the worst in the second half when the author decided to give the chatacters on the ship a colorful vocabulary that didn't even exist in the time period the author was writing in. So sad to see another author throw away talent!

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  • Anonymous

    Posted November 4, 2011

    What A Wonderful Read

    "Jamrach's Menagerie" is a must read for anyone that loves to be taken away on an adventure that spans 50-years of an English boy's life in the early 20th century. In a word, a masterpiece!

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  • Posted October 20, 2011

    Mesmorizing

    Though this topic is not my usual choice, the writing is so crisp, so beautiful that it held me, hypnotic. If you want to see a master of our language at work, read Jamrach's Menagerie. It won't disappoint.

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  • Posted June 5, 2011

    more from this reviewer

    A Compelling Read

    Jaffy Brown meets Mr. Jamrach as a young street urchin in London. Mr. Jamrach is a wild-animal importer, supplying zoos and private collectors. A tiger escapes and Jaffy, entranced, walks up to him and strokes his nose, no fear evident. Mr. Jamrach recognizes that Jaffy has an affinity for caring for animals and hires him to help in his establishment. Jaffy loves his new job and soon has a best friend, Tim. Tim is another boy in the yard and alternately the best friend and a cruel enemy to Jaffy. Tim has a twin sister, Ishbel, and Jaffy is friends with her also, and feels the start of adult feelings towards her.

    As Jaffy grows, he and Tim want more adventure. They find it when word reaches one of Mr. Jamrach's collectors that a real dragon has been spotted. He funds an expedition on a whaling ship to hunt the dragon and capture it to become the centerpiece of the collector's private zoo. Full of excitement, Jaffy jumps at the chance.

    Life as a sailor and on a whaling boat is new to Jaffy, but he soon settles in. The work is hard, but he has known nothing more. Birch gives great insight into what a whale hunt was like in those days, the breaching of the whale, men taking to the sea in small boats to defeat these gigantic creatures who could kill them with a swish of their tails, the brutal killing and work of extracting the oil.

    After weeks of whale hunting, the boat approaches the remote island where the dragon has been spotted. The Jamrach expedition sallies forth and manages to capture the mystical beast. Loading it back on the ship, they cast off to make their fortune back in London. But the beast brings bad luck and the boat sinks, leaving a few survivors to try to make their way back to their former lives.

    Carol Birch's book has been longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction for 2011, and it is evident why it was selected. Her forte is description, and she effortlessly transports the reader to another time and place. The reader feels what it must have been like to grow up poor in London, to fight the large beasts of the ocean, and to be shipwrecked. She explores the nature of friendship, and what men will do to survive. The reader cannot put the book down, drawn to find out what happens to Jaffy and his comrades. This book is recommended for all readers.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted August 17, 2011

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    Posted May 27, 2012

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    Posted May 31, 2012

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