"Water for Elephants"
Sara Gruen
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $13,95
"I'll do just about anything. But if possible I'd like to work with animals."
"Animals," he says. "Did you hear that, August? The lad wants to work with animals. You want to carry water for elephants, I suppose?" (57)
Sara Gruen opens her novel "Water for Elephants" with a quote from Dr. Seuss' book "Horton Hatches the Egg":
I meant what I said, and I said what I meant ...
An elephant's faithful — one hundred per cent!
"Elephants" lives up to that, leading me to wonder if it served as inspiration for the story.
The novel begins with a prologue, which is actually a shortened version of the climax, then brings the reader up to now, where the main character, Jacob Jankowski, is a 90something confined to a nursing home. When he learns the circus is coming to town, he flashes back to his days as part of a traveling circus.
Jacob's story starts during the Great Depression, when he is studying to be a veterinarian at Cornell. As he is preparing to take his final examination, his parents die in a car accident, leaving him with no money and no job, as he had planned to join his father's practice. And so, in what sounds like something that could only happen in a story (but certainly actually happened during this time), he Jacob runs off to join the circus.
Jacob doesn't intentionally join the circus, however. He jumps a train that just happens to be a circus train, and he just happens to be able to get a job working with the animals. During his time with The Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, Jacob finds an enemy in the head animal trainer (August), a friend in the dwarf clown (Walter), and a love in the star performer (Marlena).
Life in the circus changes when Uncle Al, who runs The Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, modifies the travel schedule to pick up an elephant when another circus collapses. Rosie joins the show, and Jacob immediately falls in love with the animal. While most of the workers, such as August, think Rosie is dumb, Jacob sees her intelligence and develops a connection with her.
Although Gruen begins her novel with the climax, little is given away because of the omitted details. I didn't understand her reason for doing it when I began reading, nor did I know when this scene would play into the book. But Gruen was smart in doing this because it sets the primary scene for the novel: the midway at the circus, with the greasy fry cook and the wild animals and the loyal roustabouts — the workers who are lowest on the totem pole but will do anything to help out their friends. And because she jumps from the prologue into 90something Jacob in the first chapter, it can be read as if it is a dream Jacob is having — a flashback to the moment that changed his life 70 years earlier.
Gruen fills her novel with historically accurate details of life on the circus train, and each circus chapter is accompanied by a photograph of 1930s era circuses. The pictures in addition to the author's colorful descriptions give the reader a sense of the sights, sounds and smells of everything Jacob experienced. The research put into the book truly paid off because it made the story come alive.
Jumping back and forth between 90something Jacob and 20something Jacob is slightly distracting from the plot of the primary story. The only reason I can figure 90something Jacob even is important to the story is because his is the type of character a reader will wonder about after the story ends.
Gruen's characters are likable and hateable, and in hindsight, predictable. Rosie, especially, serves an important role in the novel, carrying out actions to create scenes that never would have been possible without an elephant in the book.
Because I attempt to predict how the novel would end, I was disappointed when I got there. It was not the same way I would have liked to see Jacob's story end (or begin, depending on how you look at it), but I suppose it was fitting for how he got to be where he ended up.
Overall it is a good book, a colorful story. I would have structured it differently, but then again, I never would have been able to think up a plot like this.
