Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [1]
—The Daily Mail
“An exuberant tale of sea-faring, exotic fauna, and drunken shore leave … Her prose has an irresistible vigour … her words sing on the page … Jamrach’s Menagerie puts its characters through the mangler and invites us to inspect the damage—and perhaps to consider that ultimately such experiences are about nothing but the acquisition of scars. The novel is a vehicle for the delivery of somatic shocks to the reader’s brain.”
—The Financial Times
“A delirious brew of the real and the made up … A rollicking take on the story of the whale ship Essex mixed in with a dash of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness … Fearless storyteller of rare and sparkling originality … What partly makes her so treasured is her pungent, visceral prose, so lively it’s almost edible.”
—Metro
“Crammed with elemental traumas and high-grade derring-do … a kind of primitive lyricism, in which ‘ordinary’ mid-Victorian language is put to dramatic use … Terrific … As good as anything Peter Carey has done in this line and, in certain exalted moments, even better.”
—The Independent
“Put Moby-Dick, Treasure Island, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner into a pot, add a pinch of Dickens, and you will get the flavour of Carol Birch’s hugely entertaining novel … It is a roller-coaster read with never a dull moment.”
—Scottish Mail on Sunday
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Carol Birch
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in Great Britain in paperback by Canongate Books Ltd., Edinburgh.
Jacket design by Emily Mahon
Jacket illustration by Silja Goetz
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Birch, Carol
Jamrach’s menagerie : a novel / Carol Birch. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Boys—England—Fiction. 2. Whaling—Fiction. 3. Exotic
animals—Fiction. 4. Sailors—Fiction. 5. Male friendship—
Fiction. 6. Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks, etc.—
Fiction. I. Title.
PR6052.I785J36 2011
823′.914—dc22 2010038082
eISBN: 978-0-385-53441-3
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part Two
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Three
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
was born twice. First in a wooden room that jutted out over the black water of the Thames, and then again eight years later in the Highway, when the tiger took me in his mouth and everything truly began.
Say Bermondsey and they wrinkle their noses. Still, it was the home before all other homes. The river lapped beneath us as we slept. Our door looked out over a wooden rail into the channel at the front, where dark water heaved up an odd sullen grey bubble. If you looked down through the slats, you could see things moving in the swill below. Thick green slime, glistening in the slosh that banged up against it, crept up the crumbling wooden piles.
I remember the jagged lanes with bent elbows and crooked knees, rutted horse shit in the road, the dung of sheep that passed our house every day from the marshes and the cattle bellowing their unbearable sorrows in the tannery yard. I remember the dark bricks of the tanning factory, and the rain falling black. The wrinkled red bricks of the walls were gone all to tarry soot. If you touched them the tips of your fingers came away shiny black. A heavy smell came up from under the wooden bridge and got you in the gob as you crossed in the morning going to work.
The air over the river though was full of sound and rain. And