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Elephant Winter

by Kim Echlin

Sophie’s mother – an artist, only 49 – calls to say she is dying of cancer and who will look after her birds? Sophie returns to southern Ontario from Africa and takes on much greater burdens. In her first days home she watches a group of Indian elephants in the snowy fields of the adjacent safari park. Before long she is under the blankets in the elephant barn with their young caretaker. By the end of Elephant Winter, she attends her mother’s death, conceives a child, and becomes herself the elephants’ keeper.

This is a first novel for Echlin, a former arts documentary producer with CBC’s The Journal, and it’s quite a debut. Intimate, sensual, and language-loving, every line gives off light, heat, scent. Tame birds perch on lips to pick at teeth; a moist trunk traces Sophie’s vertebrae as she lies across her lover. In her mother’s farmhouse Arvo Part plays at top volume, and parrots and parakeets fill the air. Sophie starts recording elephant sounds, replaying them at lower speeds to reveal a rich language with rhythms and sentiments she compares to Dickinson and Pound. Together she and her mother compile the dictionary of Elephant that forms an integral part of the book.

Echlin selects only the most salient features of character and landscape. Spring and summer get barely a nod: almost a year passes, but it is always glitteringly cold. Though Sophie and her mother are fully realized characters, the men are fragmentary – appropriately enough, in this world where females nurture, and males disturb, impregnate, disappear. (Men and work don’t go with babies, Sophie’s mother tells her, “but you have them anyway.”) The villain of the piece, Dr. Alecto Rikes, mute, sardonic, smelling slightly of brimstone, is melodramatically evoked; details on Sophie’s gentle, principled elephant-keeper are frustratingly sparse.

The prose is transparent, elegiac. As we are lulled by rhythms almost too low for our ears to catch, suddenly things happen: elephant screams, gunfire, death, birth. The end comes too soon. Our gasp of “Oh, no!” at the final page reflects a hunch that there is more to this story, that we could expect to live with these characters longer. It is also a tribute to Echlin’s art. Slender as it is, Elephant Winter is enormously engaging, unusual enough to catch the popular imagination, and well and wisely enough written to endure.

 

Reviewer: Maureen Garvie

Publisher: Viking/Penguin

DETAILS

Price: $25

Page Count: 208 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-670-87377-2

Released: Feb.

Issue Date: 1997-1

Categories: Fiction: Novels