Author Paul Pickering바카라�s Elephant: Felt With A Trunk

Contemporary English fiction is largely concerned with cosmopo­litan life, focusing on new rea­lities like sexual diversity, man바카라�s relations with technology and responses to myriad social changes. The outcome is often outstanding바카라�Ian McEwan바카라�s Saturday and A Machine Like Me, or Bernardine Evaristo바카라�s Girl, Woman, Other. Yet such stories rarely cross the city limits.

Elephant, Paul Pickering바카라�s new novel, is an irreverent attempt to reverse this municipal centrality by harking back to the robust picaresque tradition of the 18th century. Pickering바카라�s own journeys seem to have brought him closer to the genre inhabited by masters like Defoe and Fielding. As a young man he joined the Sandinista revolution as an inte­rnationalista and listened to Fidel Castro바카라�s nine-hour haran­gue, capping it with a bone-­crushing handshake with his hero at a sugar mill during the victory celebrations. In Perfect English he recounts this experience. The Leopard바카라�s Wife traces his travels through the Congo. While researching Over the Rainbow in Afghanistan, he narrowly escaped a Taliban attack. The pull of the picaresque, like the call of the road, seems to have been irresistible for Pickering.

He has lent scale and grandeur to the simple story of an orphaned boy바카라�s relationship with an African elephant바카라�a throwback to Mowgli and Hathi in Kipling바카라�s Jungle Book바카라�to turn it into a fascinating epic spanning civilisations, continents and centuries. The backdrop of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and infusion of Schopenhauer바카라�s philosophy give the narrative an altogether different scale. Poignant moments in individuals바카라� lives combine with the tumult of uprisings, diplomatic intrigue, spooks바카라� villainous moves and nervousness in European capitals at the rise of the Reds to produce an engrossing fable on a huge canvas.

Alexei, an illegitimate child of the last Tsar in the St Petersburg imperial nursery, is exiled to a far-off place for foretelling the emperor바카라�s death: 바카라�Le Tsar doit mourir바카라�. At the peak of the revolution, he escapes, crossing the ocean with the elephant as his company in the ship바카라�s hold. The account of the boy riding the giant tusker across the English landscape dotted with distressed industrial towns to meet the British king captures the tensions and uncertainties of a time when England was grappling with the implications of Lenin being the head of the new Soviet state.   

A century later, in Covid-time New York, a Harvard academic rec­eives from anonymous sources the boy바카라�s purported memoir. Natasha soon discovers them: a clan of rich Russian émigrés owing allegiance to the Tsarist court, obliterating the 70-year interregnum of communism. Their lavish homes are an evocation of the imperial palace where Tsarist customs and rituals survive. They call Natasha 바카라�Little Princess바카라�, claiming her as one of them.

Commissioned by the clan, Natasha sets out, retracing the footsteps of the boy, who, his English mentors believed, was the sole inheritor to Tsar Nicholas II바카라�s throne and his immense investments in England. After travelling to Russia and Britain to recover Alexei from the trappings of myth, she makes a no-nonsense, professional presentation to the group about her findings. Her inquest strips bare the boy of all mystique and glory, portraying him, armed with a psychiatrist바카라�s opinion, as 바카라�autistic and probably at least borderline Asperger바카라�s바카라�. Angered by the harsh truth, the group shoos away Natasha.  

At the centre of Pickering바카라�s meticulously researched narrative is the gigantic female elephant, a metaphor for lost innocence and uncorrupted simplicity the fast-industrialising capitalist world feels apprehensive of. Alexei바카라�s dream about 바카라�the river of dark fire바카라� is actually an echo of Schopenhauer바카라�s account of 바카라�the anarchic, artistic Wille, the raw power behind creation바카라�. The elephant, as Natasha fails to convince the émigrés, 바카라�is a counter to the inhumanity of our digital age바카라�.    

Both profound and slapstick, a bit of a fantasy, Elephant is the quintessential saga of a civilisation that has irrevocably messed up its own affairs. The elephant is our aspiration for freedom. 

(This appeared in the print edition as "Felt With A Trunk")