Jamrach's Menagerie

This book had me captivated and appalled. I read late into the night and then couldn't sleep.
As an 8 year old, young Jaffy Brown is confronted by a tiger on the streets of London. He reaches out to pat him but ends up in the tiger's maw. He is rescued by Mr Jamrach the owner of the tiger. Jamrach is in the business of importing exotic animals for sale to collectors or zoos. He sees in Jaffy a natural affinity for animals and in recompense for his experience offers him work in his yards. There Jaffy makes friends with Tim Linver and his twin sister Ishbel.
Seven years later, one of Jamrach's customers is prepared to pay for the capture of a dragon for his collection. Jamrach's friend Dan Rymer is the man for the job, an experienced show more sailor and whaler. He asks the boys to accompany him to help capture and care for the animal on the long voyage. The boys are excited and see it as an opportunity to see the world and have an adventure. What ensues is nothing any of them could have imagined.
The characters in this book are wonderfully drawn, the settings vivid and depictions at times confronting. Although fiction, parts of the story are based on fact. For me it was reminiscent of The North Water. show less

”He wanted a story. A thing of horror. I have a story, a terrible one. But I’ll tell no tales. He doesn’t understand at all: it’s not that kind of a story, not horror but grief I have to deal with.” (page 276)

I very much enjoyed this book, though I am not entirely sure what to make of it. As an homage to 18th century adventure tales? A tip of the hat to 19th century coming of age novels? A reinvention of contemporary metaphorical stories urging us to reconsider our relationship to the natural world? Ultimately, I saw some of all of these (and more) in [Jamrach’s Menagerie], a novel which inspires a host of adjectives – fantastical, disturbing, hallucinogenic, humorous, brutal, life-affirming – but which, to me, suffered show more a bit from over-ambition on the part of the author.

Carol Birch writes wonderfully evocative descriptions of everything from places to emotions to characters. I flagged many fascinating and beautiful passages. I loved the basic plot of the story – London urchin is taken under the wing of an exotic animal importer, makes friends with another young boy, they both eventually set sail on a whaling ship, capture a dragon, and then are set adrift on the unforgiving ocean after their ship sinks. I also loved young Jaffy Brown’s narrative voice (”I loved my ma. To me, she would ever and always be a warm armpit in the night.”) Through that voice, we see his development from an impish child to a haunted man, and it is a well done transformation. There is a lot going on in the book and parts of it are by turns moving, horrifying, and funny. My only complaint is that the point of the story, the theme of the book, was muddied to me by the inclusion of SO MUCH. I admire Birch’s ambition but wish she had been a bit more focused.

A few passages I noted:

”I put my head back and watched the sky along with him. It was black and very starry. Starry out there is not like in London. There, starry is an observable impossibility, and looking up is a gaze into infinity.” (page 248)

”Home. Hope Ma’s all right. She should be, Charley Grant’s a good sort. Home, Ma, Ishbel, never get back, never go home, never again. A burning place in my chest. Something to hold against the terror, a blanket. I’m alive, burning brightly with a head full of everything that ever was, our Bermondsey home, the Highway, the tiger, the birds, the smell of lemon sherbet.” (page 235)

”Long as I live I’ll never be wise. Never understand why it happened as it happened, never understand where they’ve gone, all those faces I see clear in the darkness. There’s no way out of this, it’s stark: live or die. Every given moment a bubble that bursts. Step on, from one to the next, ever onwards, a rainbow of stepping stones, each bursting softly as your foot touches and passes on. Till one step finds only empty air. Till that step, live.” (page 279) show less

Jaffy Brown grows up in 19th-century London, his mother a single parent, and Jaffy is forced from a very early age to contribute to their income, but he often goes hungry. One day, as he's running an errand, he encounters an escaped tiger in the street and, not realising the danger he's in, reaches out to pat it on the nose. The tiger very gently takes his head in its mouth and drags him a few yards before the owner, Mr Jamrach, can intervene. To compensate Jaffy for the experience, he offers him a job in his menagerie, looking after a colourful variety of animals, and from then on, Jaffy`s life changes for the better. After a few years, he and his best friend Tim decide to go to sea to look for a "dragon" (actually an ora or Komodo show more dragon) for a wealthy client somewhere in the Pacific. This is the start of a wild adventure that will change Jaffy to the core of his being ...

Actually based on two true stories, and referencing a third, this is a very strange book, told in the first person by Jaffy. He's a very likeable guide, and we willingly follow him wherever he leads us: from the sewers of Bermondsey to Mr Jamrach's menagerie and the high seas. The prose is often quite luminous and appears like poetry at times, the sea with its qualities of beauty, immensity and inherent danger always present in the background. The closeness of the twenty souls on-board ship is described very movingly, in particular Jaffy's inner turmoil when misfortune befalls the enterprise. The subsequent 100+ pages don't make for easy reading and are certainly not for the squeamish but are essential for the rest of the book to understand Jaffy's emotional state (maybe it did go on for a bit too long; there were times when I started to feel distinctly queasy). I have to say that I really enjoyed the book, in particular Carol Birch's prose, at the same time I have to admit that I couldn't stomach reading it for a second time. I'm planning to read one of her previous novels soon to compare. show less

Two things that made this book for me:
1) a tiger
2) a raspberry puff

One of the oldest writer exercises is to take a noun and describe it without resorting to the same cliched adjectives and analogies that have dogged that person/place/thing ever since the first guy/gal ever wrote about it. You should be able to present the reader with this thing in such a way that your reader will feel as if s/he is reading about it for the very first time...and yet the description should be natural and familiar.

That's easier said than done, but Carol Birch does it many many times in this fine yarn, the best examples being of 1) a tiger and 2) a raspberry puff. Both of these come early on and were primarily the reason I kept reading...but it turns out show more they are reason enough, because your reward for staying with it is a narrative that takes the best of Moby-Dick, Huck Finn, and even a little bit of Dickens, all handed to you in a compact and satisfying package of about 300 pages.

Oh. There is also a dragon in the book. A Komodo dragon, but a dragon nonetheless. What more is needed? show less

This is a true story: while being delivered to Jamrach’s menagerie near Ratcliffe Highway, a Bengal tiger escaped. “An eight-year-old boy who walked up and patted it on the nose was knocked down and carried away in its mouth, but escaped unhurt after Jamrach jumped on the tiger’s back.”That eight-year-old boy of the historical record becomes Jaffy Brown in Carol Birch’s tenth novel, Jamrach’s Menagerie.She recounts this and one other historical snippet in the acknowledgments, which appear at the end of the novel, after it’s become impossible to believe that it’s only Jamrach who was real, not Jaffy Brown.Even though there were parts of this book that I hated (and if you've read it, you'll know exactly what I mean), I show more absolutely love the fact that Carol Birch was able to transport me to such unexpected places with ink and paper; I'm finding it hard to shake the experience of this read, and I'm looking forward to discovering more of this author's fiction.I have lots more to say about Jamrach's Menagerie here. show less

EEEEEeeeeew. Jamrach's Menagerie is not anybody's idea of a typical Orange Prize nominee. Although the writing is lovely, rhythmic and arresting, everything but roughly the first 60 and the last 40 pages reads like horror fiction.
Briefly, Jaffy Brown, a Victorian slum child meets an escaped (but recently fed) tiger in the streets of London and walks up to stroke its nose. Tiger and Jaffy are recovered by Jamrach, an importer of exotic animals who hires Jaf as his yard boy. There Jaffy meets Tim Linver and his sister Ishbel, who become his best friends. As teens Jaffy and Tim go on a three-year voyage with Dan Rymer, the exotic animal hunter, to bring back a dragon (which we recognize as a Komodo Dragon) for a collector.
At this point show more the story picks up and becomes a thing not for the squeamish. Birch's descriptions of a whale hunt and its aftermath are visceral (!) and sickening. The hunt for the dragon and its capture are even more so if that's possible. (A notable feature of the Komodo is apparently its slimy drool.) When the ship goes down in a waterspout and 12 men survive in two of the whaling boats, the descriptions become well-nigh unbearable. Here is one mild passage to whet your appetite or warn you away: "One day I woke and my tongue was out of my mouth. It had turned into a creature I did not know, lazy and fat, swelling and oozing as it thrust its way out into the light through the slack hole of my mouth. My own tongue made me retch. This brought tears to my eyes, which I gratefully drank."
I am glad to have read this to satisfy my curiosity. Otherwise, given the predictability of the climax, I could just as well have let it go unopened. We are invited to look into the depths of the human creature in extreme circumstances, but I'm not sure that I learned about anything except the valiant will to survive and something about the nature of forgiveness. My thanks, though, to Early Reviewers for giving me the opportunity to get it out of my system. show less

Named to the longlist for the 2011 Man Booker, Jamrach's Menagerie is a rollicking adventure story and coming-of-age tale, but it is also a meditation on mankind's relationship to the animal world, and an exploration of how far men must go to survive, and the toll that each of those takes.

The novel seems to be based partly in historical events or personages -- like Jamrach. But it is a richly imagined work that manages to be both realistic and sometimes dreamlike. And while the life of the narrator Jaffy Brown might bring to mind Dickens, Melville or Patrick O'Brian, he also stands on his own as a terrific character.

Much happens in this novel, as Jaffy grows from an impoverished boy who encounters a tiger on a London street, to a youth show more who works at Jamrach's shop, to a teen who ships out on a whaling boat to hunt a mysterious dragon, to a survivor of shipwreck who is adrift with his fellows for 65 days. For most of his journey he is accompanied by his friend and rival, a boy a little older and a lot more sure of himself named Tim Linver, whose twin sister Jaffy loves. There is a full cast of characters, from family members and shipmates to some of the captured animals, all of whom are memorably sketched.

As Jaffy walks, then sails, through his early years, the novel explores mankind's twinned exploitation of, and attraction to, animals, from the whales slaughtered for their skin, oil and bones, to the exotic lizard, tiger or wombat captured to stock London collections, and even to the songbirds and dogs kept as pets. Man's essential animal nature moves front and center as the hunters stalk their dragon, only to see the whaling ship run into bad luck before finally encountering the storm that leads to shipwreck and the struggle to survive. In a story with so much going on, the author's sure hand keeps everything moving with assurance and energy. This is a very impressive book, and also a very gripping read. show less