Crocodile Soup: A Novel

by Julia Darling

Overview

Gert Hardcastle is thirty-something and unlucky in love. She is also estranged from her mother. As Crocodile Soup opens, she thinks she has found "the One" — the enigmatic Eva, who serves coffee at the cafeteria in the museum where Gert works as a curator cataloging Egyptian artifacts. As Gert embarks on her hilarious and poignant pursuit of Eva, she looks back on her eccentric, childhood through a series of vivid and surreal flashbacks: her obsessive twin, Frank, with whom she communicates telepathically; her father, George, who vanished to Africa to salvage the family crocodile farm; her vain, neglectful mother, Jean; and the family ghost — a Victorian poet who haunts the attic.

In a narrative studded with relentless humor and giddy self-deprecation, Julia Darling introduces an endearing cast of characters whose shared and wayward search for love is irresistible.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060090401
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/02/2002
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Julia Darling is a playwright, poet, and short-story writer. Crocodile Soup is her first novel. She lives in northern England with her two daughters.

Read an Excerpt

The First Letter

Dear Gert,

I know I haven't been in touch for some time, but then neither have you. Cameron died last week, of a brain haemorrhage. He collapsed in the middle of playing my favourite tune, 'Making the Waves Sleep,' at the local club. We used to go there every Saturday night. I'm not sure what to do now. We've been living in a small flat near Waterloo Station, but the landlord wants me out and I've got nowhere to go.

I was wondering if I could stay with you. Please get in touch soon, as I'm already in arrears.

With love
Your mother, Jean

A Vision In The Stuffed Bird Room

The day that I got my mother's letter it was autumn and the air was thick with the fumes of sparklers and the breath of nervous dogs. I stuffed the letter behind the radiator, along with various questionnaires and memos. Upstairs, the museum was closed. I was looking into the caverns of an Egyptian pot, lost in a hieroglyphic daydream, when I heard a tapping sound coming from the stuffed bird collection which was right above my room. For a moment I thought the frozen birds had stepped down from their perches and were pecking the long oak floor with their beaks. I put down the fragment and wiped my spectacles. I frowned. The sound had a rhythm.

I walked nervously up the wide stone steps; past the fossilized turtle and the depressed newts, and into the bird room. I peered through a glass panel containing a golden eagle. I blinked. There in the half darkness was a figure. She was dancing a tango on the empty floor to an audience of perplexed birds. She tapped and circled, concentrating with the most extraordinary poise. She was holding aninvisible partner. I watched her, mesmerized. Then, just as she pivoted and turned, she raised her head and saw me. She stopped dancing. I recognized her. She was the new girl who worked in the canteen. We stared at each other in shock. Then she disappeared.

The next day, my colleague Theobald, who worked with insects, told me the girl serving coffee was called Eva. When he said her name a light went on somewhere inside me. Suddenly everything was illuminated. I noticed the dust everywhere; and the fact that at night fine specks drifted from old exhibits onto my papers, so that when I drew my hands across them in the morning, they left a path. I realized that as I sat there, dust was gathering on the crown of my head.

I was in the middle of labelling a vast collection of ancient artefacts. It had taken me years to reach this position. I had burrowed my way down; from lofty university campuses, to archaeological digs, to the reading rooms of basement archives, and finally to a comfortable underworld, an archaeological institute in the centre of a Northern city, beneath a municipal museum. Not far from where I sat there were bridges and council estates, shops selling mops for seventy-five pence, shopping malls teeming with Northern people carrying plastic bags full of consumer goods that would be eaten or played with, and then discarded, and buried beneath the ground. This was the kind of thing I thought about, and which sometimes could make me have panic attacks the size of Egypt.

But other days I wondered if anyone actually read my well-researched labels. It could take six months to trace the exact origin of a cup, or a brooch. I rarely saw the public, although I heard them sometimes, rattling through the tannoy system, dropping coins and munching mints.

I liked my work. It was intricate and elaborate. It absorbed me into long trances when I forgot everything. It was a passion.

Eva looked ordinary in the canteen. She was in her twenties; she wore an overall. She had strong eyes, short modern hair and a high forehead. She reminded me of a figurehead of a ship. She ignored me. I sat, drinking her coffee, which was strong and frothy, watching her.

I felt as if I had discovered a totally intact early Egyptian scroll and that I should handle the find with care.

But I was also not myself; romantically or professionally. I was not used to emotion. The institute was not generally an emotive place. It was good for shelving and filing, and storing, and that's why I liked it.

But after the day when I first saw Eva it occurred to me that I may as well be an exhibit myself, and that maybe lunch was more interesting than history.

Crocodile Soup. Copyright © by Julia Darling. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

British novelist Darling showcases a lively, engaging voice in her debut, bringing abundant humor to the unique cynicism of her protagonist and the heartfelt pathos in her plot. Gertrude Hardcastle works in the basement of an archeological museum in England cataloguing potsherds. Isolated, she feels safe: "I was not used to emotion. The institute was not generally an emotive place. It was good for shelving and filing, and that's why I liked it." But Gert's placid existence is disrupted by a pleading letter from her estranged mother and an "inappropriate obsession" with Eva, the young woman who serves coffee to the museum's staff. The intrusion of emotion into Gert's comfortable seclusion prompts her to revisit key moments in her childhood, to which the reader is treated in short, amusing chapters that develop the cumulative drama. Why Gert prefers her lonely life soon becomes clear: as a child growing up in a rambling house haunted by a dead poet, Gert was misunderstood and neglected by her mother (her father was often absent tending the family crocodile farm), and relegated to a dreary life in the attic (while her twin brother, Frank, lived downstairs). Slowly and with many missteps, Gert ventures out of the museum and into the world, unearthing an unorthodox community of people to care for her. In many ways, this is a coming-of-age novel, but one with such charmingly messed-up characters that it seems refreshingly new. Some aspects of the plot are fairy tale-like in their absurdity (Gert's telepathic relationship with her twin, for instance), but with the character of Gert providing its spiritual heart, the novel is entertaining, moving and emotionally real. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

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