Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch

Posted on: May 03, 2012

Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch

Previously published in Dawn Books & Authors. 

Jamrach’s Menagerie is a good old rollicking romp of a sea yarn, full of adventure on the high seas, fantastic beasts and monsters and of course, the tests of true friendship. It’s almost as if Dickens wrote Moby Dick, but with far more humour and a grisly hand lent from Golding. All the parts of the narrative that take place on land are incredibly Dickensian – Jaf is a scrappy London street urchin who stupidest moment is also his luckiest – he walks up to a huge Bengal tiger on the loose from a supplier of animals, and strokes its nose. The tiger proceeds to pick him up unharmed in his mouth until the owner of the menagerie, Jamrach, extracts the boy from the tiger’s jaws. In a mixture of guilt and fear and wonder that the boy is unharmed, Jamrach hires Jaf to care for the animals. And so begins Jaf’s second life, one filled with exotic animals, people of every sort and finally, some riveting adventure.

Carol Birch sticks to a very simple narrative on the surface – Jaf signs up to be part of a ship’s crew recruited to sail to an unknown island to capture a mythic beast, the dragon known as the ‘Ora’. It is soon clear to the reader that this creature is a Komodo dragon, but to the crew it is something unknown about which there are simply ‘lots of tales’.  It is expected to be a long and dangerous journey and so it is clear that the entire crew will not all survive, but it is also clear that Jaf, the narrator has. What happens along the way is what Jamrach’s Menagerie is about: Birch doesn’t need a more complicated narrative: this is enough for a quick, fierce, compact adventure. Of course, a story of friendship, brotherhood and humanity is clear between the lines of the high drama on the high seas.

The hunting of the dragon is an adventure so exotic to Birch’s characters that Jaf’s narrative makes the landscape and the actual capture surreal. The captured Komodo dragon itself is described as the stuff of dreams: ‘It was magnificent … The size of it! That chest, the muscles in those arms, the skin like ancient armour, scaly and notched and scarred…’ It is a magnificent demon, a god who brings bad luck to the ship forcing them into ‘dragon time’, an intelligent creature whose communication with a mad man on the ship results in frightening catastrophes. ‘If there is anything to be learned from my story,’ says Jaf, ‘perhaps it is this: never go to sea with a madman.’

The idea of madness and chaos is resolute throughout the book – it is what keeps the narrative interesting, raising it to a perfect fever pitch during the novels most gripping and horrific moments. Much of it has a slight nightmarish quality: dream-like, if the dream rested on undercurrents of evil and the grotesque. In one of the crew’s initial sighting of the Komodos, Birch describes them in a way that foreshadows what is to come: ‘a mess of them like eels slipping wormily over one another in a muddy tussle over a foul carcass, a read and pink rag trailing festoons, the grinning head of which, half severed and hanging back, revealed it to be one of their own’. A ship with a dragon and a madman who thinks he can talk to it – so much could go wrong and so much more does. Birch handles the chaos and madness perfectly; Jaf’s voice is perfectly clear throughout the narrative, he is a reliable and faithful narrator, vested in telling the truth best he can even when deep in the fug of madness and starvation. A heavy dose of the grotesque exists – this is a frightening, bloody and gory story at many times. Survival when adrift on the high seas is a grisly matter at best, and Birch presents it at its very bloodiest worst. Its visceral, it’s violent and it’s just very intriguing.

It’s not just the nautical adventure angle that is so strong in the novel - Birch’s East Londonis brilliant, bawdy stuff. It is a full, rich milieu, heavily accented with colours, sounds and smells that lift right off the page. Jaf’s story travels speedily from a Dickensian childhood complete with a capricious teenage love interest, to a whaling adventure, to a brutal survival story and back, with serious baggage, to foggy London. Jamrach’s Menagerie is a complete, neat adventure, no loose ends left, but plenty of imagery that won’t vanish easily.