The Elephant Keeper Book

The Elephant Keeper is an engaging novel and an interesting meditation on the relationship between human beings and animals, and on power and class divisions within human society. I liked an assessment in a Guardian review I found online, which captures the novel's themes well: "a rich meditation on the Enlightenment: its rationality and superstition, silly games and serious concerns."

The title character of The Elephant Keeper, Tom Page, is a trainee groom tasked by an eighteenth-century English nobleman to take charge of his expensive new toys, a pair of elephants. The novel's female protagonist is the she-elephant Jenny, whose downwardly-mobile odyssey Tom faithfully follows, from cosseted aristocratic pet and natural-philosophical "curiosity" to public spectacle in a tawdry London menagerie. The tale is quite unashamedly a love story, with Tom increasingly alienated from his own species and drawn emotionally and even erotically to the gentle, dignified Jenny. This is all highly romanticized; but since the novel is narrated in the first person by Tom, we are free to read his bond with the elephant (or "the Elephant") either as the lonely fantasizing of a young social misfit, or as a true cross-species mingling of kindred souls. I migrated between the two as I was reading the novel, depending on my mood of the day.

By chance, I read The Elephant Keeper not long after a rereading of Gulliver's Travels, whose fourth book, set in the land of the super-horse Houyhnhms, is one of Nicholson's key subtexts. I also read it not long after Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau, again centered on the relationship of man and beast. The juxtaposition was interesting. Nicholson's novel is far less savage than Swift or Wells, and more interested in animals per se, and not merely as a stick with which to beat humanity. Here is the novel's most explicit philosophical statement, a textbook "animal rights" plea to extend the Enlightenment notion of human equality and fraternity beyond the bounds of our species.

It is a vision almost too much to bear, my eyes prickle with shame: for even as I write "among their own kind," I feel a kind of kinship with these creatures. We inhabit the same world; we breathe the same air, beneath the same sky … We are born into a state of helplessness; we grow, and learn to fend for ourselves; we feel pleasure and pain; we grow old and die. Why do philosophers always look for differences instead of likenesses?