Jamrach's Menagerie

April 11, 2011
This wracking maritime psychodrama follows a young boy from his humble beginnings as a child laborer in late 19th-century London to the South Pacific, finding bits of whimsy and beauty in a chaotic story. Jaffy Brown's bleak young life in the slums takes a bright turn when he is carried off by an escaped tiger and wins the notice of Charles Jamrach, a purveyor of exotic animals. Jamrach gives Jaffy a job, and soon the boy is sent on a years-long journey to the South Pacific, where he is supposed to find a dragon. It becomes slowly evident that the dragon quest, which is dispatched in an anticlimax, works as a macguffin for a dark and drifting tale of woe on the high seas as Jaffy's expedition is beset by disasters sinister and otherworldly. Birch's writing is assured and enticing, and she's especially talented at creating floating, still moments amid the action, often as Jaffy pauses to foreshadow or ruminate. Readers will spend much time wondering where this gratifyingly bizarre story is going, though Birch's writing chops do much to smooth the way.

Starred review from April 15, 2011

A magical, literary novel puts a surreal spin on a coming-of-age seafaring saga.

Among the amazements of the 10th novel by the British, award-winning Birch is that it is the first to be published in America. Its narrator is a young boy named Jaffy Brown, who begs to be described as a Dickensian "street urchin," but whose life changes irrevocably after he encounters a tiger on a street near the Thames and proves uncommonly brave when the animal takes the boy into its mouth. The tiger belongs to Charles Jamrach, an importer of exotic animals who recruits Jaffy to go to sea on a whaling expedition that has a much more ambitious goal: to capture a dragon. Among his shipmates will be Tim, another boy with whom Jaffy bonds but who is very competitive, creating a tension complicated by Jaffy's attraction to Tim's sister. All of this is narrated in retrospect, decades later, after Jaffy has discovered how it feels to be "stuck between a mad God and merciless nature." Yet it retains a sense of childlike wonder in its lyrical prose, as the line between what Jaffy is experiencing and what he is dreaming blurs the longer he is at sea: "Nowhere clearer than the ocean for a bright state of being, of falling with constant clarity into the vortex inside...Sometimes it felt as if the stars out there, far from all land, were screaming. Hundreds of miles blaring at your head. So beautiful, that night, waking in the sky with the screaming stars all around." The ill-fated voyage finds the dragon haunting the young mariner much the same as the albatross did Coleridge's ancient mariner. Before it is over Jaffy will have his first taste of death. And worse. If prayer was the only passable path to salvation, Jaffy felt "it had become long since plain that God didn't answer. Not so's the average idiot could understand anyway."

Jaffy's experience could well move the reader as profoundly as it changed the narrator.

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January 1, 2011

A young lad dashing through the streets of Victorian London runs smack into an escaped circus animal and nearly becomes its dinner. His rescuer regales him with stories of shipboard adventure, and soon our young hero finds himself bound for the South Seas. Birch is an award winner in Britain, and as this book is said to carry hints of Great Expectations, Moby-Dick, and Andrea Barrett's The Voyage of Narwhal, it is well worth watching.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 15, 2011
When he is eight years old, Jaffy Brown, a nineteenth-century London street urchin, finds himself in the mouth of an escaped tiger. While he survives that unpleasantness, the experience does change his life when the tigers owner, Mr. Jamrach, an importer of exotic animals, gives him a job. Seven years later the boy, along with this best friend, Tim, finds himself aboard a whaler headed for the South Seas. Their assignment: capture a fabled dragon for Mr. Jamrach, who will then sell it to a wealthy and eccentric collector. Things do not go as planned, and the result is an almost unbearably suspenseful story of adventure and survival. But it is also a story of madness, malevolence, and an almost palpable evil. And as the story advances, a powerfully pervasive sense of melancholy takes hold of the reader, much as the tiger did young Jaffy, and one wonders if it will ever let go. Though Mr. Jamrach is based on a historical figure, and Jaffys voyage on the real-life account of the ill-fated whaler Essex, the story is entirely Birchs, and her principal characters are her own wonderful invention. She is, moreover, a brilliant stylist; reading her is like Christmas, every word being a gift to the reader. Though Birch is an established writer in England, this is her first novel to be published in the U.S. One fervently hopes it will not be the last.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)