Carol Birch - Jamrach's Menagerie

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Gripping, moving and haunting

I thought this was an excellent book. It is gripping, moving and haunting and although it deals with a great deal of suffering and sheer horror, it is often very beautiful.

From the title and some reviews which describe it as "rollicking" and a "romp," I expected a jolly story about a young man becoming involved with an exotic menagerie in Victorian London. It turned out to be very different - a complex, literary novel of the sea as our narrator sets off on a journey on one of the last of the whaling ships under sail to find and capture an exotic, possibly mythical, creature. I found it utterly enthralling, with much to say about the nature of friendship, of growing up, people's behaviour in desperate times, guilt and redemption and much more. It never preaches or philosophises, but presents us with a vivid picture of very real-seeming people, often in extremities of endurance and suffering, and asks us to consider them compassionately. There are incidents and characters here which will remain with me for a long time.

The book also captures wonderfully the atmosphere of Victorian London and of life on a sailing ship and whaler. Melville, Patrick O'Brian and others have set a phenomenally high standard for novels of the sea, whaling and the age of sail but I think Carol Birch, while wholly different from either, matches them for believability and her ability to transport the reader into her world. I thought that the description of the pursuit, killing and processing of a whale was simply brilliant, for example, even though it was familiar from other novels. There were several other passages which were just as good.

The prose was a real pleasure to read. It has an individual voice, is extremely readable and manages to convey subtle and complex emotions and situations remarkably effectively. There are times when it is almost poetic and at others verging on hallucinatory, but is always exactly appropriate to the story. I have not read any of Carol Birch's previous novels, but I certainly will now.

Given what I expected, I am surprised to find myself enthusing so strongly about this book, but I genuinely thought it was outstandingly good and I recommend it extremely warmly.