The Tusk That Did the Damage
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in the Guardian
Shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize
'One of the most compelling and unusual novels I've read this year.... A fascinating story of hunters and observers, old mythical gods and modern politics.' Sarah Hall, Guardian Books of the Year
When a young elephant is brutally orphaned by poachers, it is only a matter of time before he begins terrorising the countryside, earning his malevolent name from the humans he kills and then tenderly buries with leaves.
Manu, the studious son of a rice farmer, loses his cousin to the Gravedigger and is drawn into the alluring world of ivory hunting.
Emma is working on a documentary set in a Kerala wildlife park with her best friend. Her work leads her to witness the porous boundary between conservation and corruption and she finds herself caught up in her own betrayal.
As the novel hurtles toward its tragic climax, these three storylines fuse into a wrenching meditation on love and revenge, fact and myth, duty and sacrifice. In a feat of audacious imagination and arrestingly beautiful prose, The Tusk That Did the Damage tells an original and heartbreaking story about how we treat nature, and each other.
*Tania James's spellbinding new novel Loot is available for pre-order now!*
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This ambitious but uneven novel by James (Atlas of Unknowns) tells three intersecting stories involving a murderous elephant on the loose in an Indian jungle. Part of the novel follows the elephant, Gravedigger, and does a stunning job evoking an animal's sensory world, as when he remembers "the bark of soft saplings, the saltlicks, the duckweed, the tang of river water, opening and closing around his feet." These sections also heartbreakingly capture the elephant's terror and confusion in the face of human cruelty: the scene of the murder of Gravedigger's mother, and his subsequent mistreatment as part of a traveling show, are almost unbearable to read. This narrative is a tour de force, and the other sections in the book pale by comparison. The chapters dealing with a love triangle involving two American documentarians and their subject, an Indian elephant veterinarian, seem to be from a lesser moral universe and are ultimately forgettable after the life-or-death stakes of Gravedigger's sections. The story line about Manu, a would-be poacher, fares better by evoking the crushing economic and social realities of rural life in India, but is diminished by heavy-handed plotting. Having already killed one member of Manu's family, Gravedigger pounces from the shadows to maim a second in a misguided scene that comes off like grim parody. Still, the Gravedigger sections are so original and moving as to tower over the novel's less successful elements.
