The Elephant Keepers' Children

Peter Høeg gives away the plot of The Elephant Keepers' Children fairly quickly. In the first chapter. Which is ten pages long. Our protagonist (who is all of fourteen) and his sister (sixteen) have discovered the secret to zen, which is a mishmash of aphorisms such as living in the moment and pursuing your dreams, all mostly alluded to through the character's strained silences after epiphanic moments, which are, to be honest, about two pages apart.

Now would you be surprised if I said I enjoyed the book? No, because you are used to me being facetious and recognise the greater potential for humour (you say sarcasm; I say wit) in a negative review. And because my really negative reviews are often less humourous than just plain negative, maybe even mean (if you can't do, criticise!).

The first novel of Høeg's that I read was Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow. Chances are you have watched the similarly laboured and Nordically dark movie, although that is pretty much all they have in common, if I remember the movie correctly, which it is entirely possible I do not. 'Laboured' here is a compliment. The book is intense, as is living in the confines of the darkness and then the sunlight of a northern country. So intense and brooding that my restless soul felt soothed.

Miss Smilla begins with the death of a young boy who lived in the same housing complex as the main character, which is ruled accidental but she reveals was not. The mystery story that follows is also (perhaps more so) an untangling of Miss Smilla's own fractured past and her acceptance of another loner into her life. The last few pages are a confrontation of intense meaning and brooding life (did you catch that?) that soothed this restless soul.

This is a good thing, unless you perhaps are happy-go-lucky, and believe good people deserve good things and bad people deserve bad things, or if you are on good terms with the universe. In which case I should like to meet you, hand you a glass of wine and interrogate you. For example, what should one do to pursue a meaningful career in books and make dollops of cash and give back to the community while maintaining a life?

Anyway, Miss Smilla goes down in my notes (I don't really keep notes, except this blog) as one of the most intense (intense in the sense of a plaster being ripped off) books I have ever read. Alice in Wonderland perhaps being the first because of the chapter where she has been welcomed into someone's house and then grows and grows until she rips the entire thing up, nevermind when she is being chased by cards because the queen says they must chop off her head. 

The second book of his I read was Borderliners, which is about an experiment in the 60s in a boarding school. Children with social and behavioural issues are being integrated with 'normal' children in a 'normal' school. The protagonist is one of the former, but he frames the story as a conspiracy of his own making (as opposed to the one really unveiling). Again the last few pages are so intense, partly because we finally realise the full scope of the real story, but also partly because of the boy's own realisations.

I suppose it is a bit like Alice realising the queen is her mother as she is being pursued by her brothers.

The Elephant Keepers' Children is Høeg's latest book. I was waiting for the paperback to come out (see above re the dollops of cash I do not earn as I suffer for my art blah blah schmak) but stumbled across a trade paperback in a local bargain book store. Yay!

The cover is simply drawn, probably digitally: a series of walls receding into the distance, ladders leaned against them, and on the foremost wall, a boy sitting on top of the wall and a girl climbing. If I were the publisher I may have asked for the perspective of the children and ladders to be reviewed, because the angles are not realistic: the ladders should poke through the walls at those angles and that boy should slide straight off. But maybe that is the point and I am looking past it.

It is about a family, set in the same darkly intense country as the other novels. It too is a mystery, but the story is (seemingly) lighter, almost dreamlike and the mystery is being explored more than discovered.

The family includes three long-suffering children; long-suffering because their parents seem to be uninhibited, autistic delinquents, despite being the curators of a local parish. The children, specially the younger children (Peter and Tilda), are tasked with keeping their parents in line and routinely project this on to other people, including a local entrepreneur who runs a fetish sex hotline and the local camp drug dealer, who is also a count. Their parents disappear and the authorities swoop in to lock them up in a rehab clinic - err, what?

Ok, not almost dreamlike; mostly, perhaps entirely dreamlike. I avoided this because I was afraid you would get the wrong idea. You have the wrong idea. The fantasy is made of symbols set on a real landscape. The boy describes his school, the local tourist trade, the mainland and a sponsored cruise, which are all realistic, except that he and his sister are resilient super-heroes, talking their way through adult conversations and donning disguises, with a pet dog in tow.

He also seems to understand his parents' behaviour (and all human behaviour, in fact) in a way that I all (all 30-odd years of me) could not. I will not disclose the rest of the mystery but this one is proffered up front: the elephant is your ego and super-ego, the parts of you that are grandiose, instinctive, uninhibited by social mores - in the parents' case, conniving. An elephant can be a couple of tons of destruction, plowing through thorn trees and rolling over cars. The keeper is the id, or the conscious part of you. The part that inhibits - that drowns the part of you eyeing dollops of cash being handed over at the teller next to you.

And that is nowadays generally reviled by the part of society that does not rely on the animals for an income, as cruel. Which includes me. But I am conflicted. About everything.

The boy perceives the parents to be uninhibited, autistic delinquents (that's not just a projection) but also reasons that his parents have their own elephants that he doesn't understand and that they are the keepers. He and his sister need to protect them from themselves. In this case the keeper is holding on for dear life, or playing along because he sees something here to his own benefit (no one ever said the keeper isn't conniving too).

Perhaps the parents represent his own elephant and his portrayal of himself his own keeper. After all, who doesn't harbour some kind of fantasy at the expense of their parents? Apparently this is what drives Disney movies: the cute and furry orphaned animal, which matches a dream of ourselves as brave orphaned children, free of the shackles of society. If you don't dream it now, deny you did when you were shorter than the counter in the kitchen. Even Alice is abandoned by her family in her own dream.

I confess (don't worry, not that kind of confession, although a blog is a good place for such things) I did not enjoy this book as much as I did Høeg's others. I confess (again!) that is an understatement. See, I enjoy tortured, intense, brooding, navel-gazing literature. See above. That is what I have come to expect from the author, in the same way that romance watchers expect to a happily ever after - or at least a smooch - imagine Eat, Pray, Love, without any romance (which was what I expected, actually).

I enjoyed the approach until mid-way, when the fantasy began to swing upwards and I lost track of the plot between all the slashes and diacritics (awful but true). It reminded me of Borderliners, suspended on the free living and loving of the same time period. But without the nihilism. Or romance. Were romance expected. Which it wasn't.

This isn't a negative review (truly) but it isn't a positive one. It is a halfhearted and a little confused one. I want to recommend this book to the stars (hyperbole), like I would any other f Høeg's (to the Northern Lights) (not hyperbole), but if you're reading this, you expect existential crisis as other people would expect romance. Well, not as, but you know what I mean. So read Miss Smilla and Borderliners, and if you enjoy them, don't read The Elephant Keepers' Children.