The Love Triangle Comes Full Circle
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen is a good story. It is not a beautifully-written book, but it is a wonderful story. And it is a story with everything.
It is a story with a love triangle. Not just any ordinary love triangle, mind you, but one including a man, a woman and an elephant. Incredibly, the triangle is probably the most normal part of the tale.
It’s also a story about the circus, the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, no less. I haven’t read a book about the circus since Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes came out back in ’62. Circuses have always been dark places for me. It is not surprising then that I found Water for Elephants a dark book. It is about the seamier and steamier side of a life not evident under ‘The Big Top’. It takes place during the Great Depression, adding a layer of dreariness and desperation.
It’s a story about being trapped. Jacob Jankowski, in a decrepit body dumped in a claustrophobic nursing home where only memories of his days in the circus provide relief. Marlena, the star of an equestrian act, in a bad marriage to an abusive husband. Rosie the elephant, in a circumstance hardly of her choosing only seconds away from the painful prodding of a bull hook. All three in a world of wonder, excitement, passion and abject cruelty.
Most importantly, it’s a story about escape. Jacob loses everything when his parents are killed in a car accident. He runs away with the circus where his training as a veterinarian would come in most handy. He then has to escape the circus when the darkness begins to close in. Finally, altogether too many years later, he has to escape the straightjacket of his confinement and run back to the only home he ever really knew.
Inevitably, the book, as life, comes full circle. It is the way.
Interesting sidebar on this book and on Sara Gruen, a Canadian born and bred author currently residing in an environmentalist community outside Chicago. Despite the moderate acclaim earned by her first two novels, Riding Lessons and Flying Changes, her publisher turned down Water for Elephants. Eventually, she struck a cheap deal with Algonquin. 12 weeks on the N.Y. Times best-seller list and a quarter million dollars later, Gruen was set. Spiegel & Grau paid $5 million for her fourth novel, Ape House and another as-yet-unnamed book.
Eventually, talent, as life, becomes its own reward. It is also the way.
