FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| BOOKS Once Upon an Elephant The first part of the title of Ashok Mathur's second novel, Once Upon an Elephant, suggests it's some sort of fairy-tale. The second part of the title suggests it's the third instance of Canadian fiction's recent elephant-obsession. (First it was Kim Echlin's Elephant Dreams, then Barbara Gowdy's The White Bone, now it's Mathur.) Well, the sort-of fairy-tale implication makes some sense, as Once Upon an Elephant manages to cast a Through the Looking Glass kind of fantastical-yet-revealing quality over a riverside city something like our own. The elephant-obsession idea makes less sense once you read a ways in and discover that whole elephants aren't that common in Once Upon an Elephant. An elephant's body turns up by the river, along with a human head. A man with the head of an elephant subsequently appears in a courtroom. But intact, real elephants aren't easy to find. If Once Upon an Elephant isn't exactly about elephants, then what is it about? Part courtroom drama, part murder mystery, part satire, part meditation on the way we grasp after simple identities and habitual expectations (for example, familiar categories for books), Mathur's novel mixes genres and cultures. It's funny, it's written in brief, pointed chapters, and it makes you think again about your own habits of thought. Gods like Parvati and Shiva walk the prairie earth, mingling their melodramas with those of plain folks like the negligent, hypocritical Judge McEchern. Straight-talking prairie cops like Gregor Simpson and Delilah Watson take unexpected detours in their personal lives. If you've read G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday you might have some sense of the playfully flowing "allegoreality" of the book. But Chesterton was a Catholic writer who thought he had the truth. Mathur's more interested in "the fluidity of stories, the happy merging of fictive and lived realities." Once into Once Upon an Elephant, you'll find it's hard to get out. Harry Vandervlist |