In Which Trai Reviews 'Water for Elephants'

I haven't done this in a while, but I'm reviewing the book and movie in tandem given that I saw the movie barely a day after finishing the book and it seems silly to review them separately!

The Book: Water for Elephants

The Author: Sara Gruen

How I Found It: I decided to act on my longstanding interest in reading the book after seeing Christoph Waltz would star in the movie adaptation (I will follow this man's career to the end after seeing Inglourious Basterds!).

The Review: Jacob Jankowski has ended up on the wrong side of fate. Just as he is about to sit his final exams for his veterinary science degree at Cornell, he is informed that his parents have been killed in a car crash--and that his father defaulted on the second mortgage he took out to pay Jacob's education. Left with nowhere to go, Jacob is wandering along the railroad tracks when a train passes, and he hops on without knowing just what he'll find.

What he does find is the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, a traveling circus run by the tyrannical Uncle Al, who is hell-bent on outperforming the Ringling Brothers. Jacob is tasked with looking after an ill liberty horse, told to fix the problem when it is clear the horse won't last much longer. The performer in the liberty horses act is Marlena, who has such a way with the horses that Jacob is taken with her immediately.

As Jacob begins to perform his duties as the show's official vet, he is drawn closer and closer to Marlena... and Marlena's volatile husband August. The situation isn't helped by the addition of the elephant Rosie to the show; Rosie is allegedly stupid and unable to be taught. Jacob finds himself in love with both Marlena and Rosie--and has to figure out how to protect them both from August's violence.

I don't think I was quite as taken with this book as others were. It rates about three stars for me--I liked it, but I can't say I thought it was anything too amazing, writing-wise. There's an impressive amount of period accuracy and Gruen clearly did her homework many times over, but the writing itself was just basic, nothing too elegant or worth remembering. I wasn't so sure how well the framing device worked for me, either: we open the book with the elderly Jacob in a nursing home, and keep returning to him periodically as the story goes on. The thing is, I start wondering if I can read these sections without laughing when phrases like "my ticker" and "dagnabbit" are thrown around in all seriousness. Towards the end, I did like the elderly Jacob sections, as they gave us a sense of the full life he'd led, but in the beginning, I found myself rolling my eyes a bit at the cheesy language.

My other gripe was about Jacob and Marlena, who were far too flat and uninteresting for my tastes. Jacob is this utter paragon of goodness, to the point that it becomes so boring to read about him! He's the defender of animals and abused women, the type of person who feels immediate shame at guarding the "cooch tent." (All of this would be interesting if he only had flaws. I just wanted the kid to do something wrong once in a while just to prove that he was human.) Marlena comes off as little more than a caricature of a female character of the era, and even her backstory was cliched. I couldn't buy into their romance because I honestly didn't see much substance to it. Jacob seems to fall in love with her because of her prowess with horses and the fact that he (a) can't have her and (b) wants to protect her from abuse. Wanting to protect her is noble, but it just fell flat for me when I couldn't see any other reason to want them to be together. I'm also not a fan of characters falling in love far too quickly (as in, a few days to a few weeks), and that was what happened here.

However, that's not to say the characterizations were all bad. On the contrary, I loved reading about August and Rosie, as well as Jacob's friends Kinko/Walter and Camel. (I think it says something when your villain and an animal character are more interesting than your two leads.) Jacob's friendships with Kinko/Walter and Camel were nicely handled and became touching at the end. August was twisted and sadistic, but that was much more interesting than Jacob's flawlessness. Rosie was amusing and noble, and it was great to read about how she was trained and all the things elephants are capable of. I had no idea they were as smart as they apparently are. This book left me with a newfound appreciation for animals who perform, as long as they're treated well.

That brings me to the issue of appropriateness--I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone younger than 15 or so, or at the very least, a mature 14. I was meant to read this book for my high school book club a few years ago, until the teacher we ran it with read up to the part with the cooch tent and realized it was inappropriate for our younger members! I'm not normally one to object to sexual content in books, but I think this one would be a little too much for younger readers. And then there's something that would really bother sensitive readers and/or animal lovers: the animal abuse. Those were the only parts of the book that had me crying. August beats Rosie on more than one occasion, and it's just hideous to read about. (Not to mention the slightly unorthodox methods of keeping the animals fed and housed, which were cruel.) The animal abuse is certainly period-correct, but it was tough for me to stomach and would definitely bother younger readers.

Overall, I felt the book was a good read, but nothing truly special, due to the flatness of Jacob and Marlena's characterizations and the plain writing style. I think it's a good beach read, something a person could race through in a day or two, but it's not much more substantial than that. However, in one of the only times I will say this, I felt the movie was much better than the book.

Because the characters and story were so outrageous, it just seemed like a story that needed to be seen, not read. All the description in the world can't match the actual sight of the circus acts, or the elephant herself. It was great to actually see the liberty horses, to see the elephant who played Rosie, Tai, get to do the things I was amazed at when I read them in the book.

Jacob and Marlena were played well enough by Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon, and their lack of flaws and bland personalities didn't seem to grate at me as much onscreen. I actually enjoyed watching them together and could buy into their physical chemistry. The final sequence of the film (which I won't spoil here) left me crying, and I realized that I felt more for the characters in the film than I did their novel counterparts, a sign that the movie was, in my eyes, better.

Christoph Waltz played August to skin-crawling perfection; the standout scene for me was when he directs Jacob and Marlena to touch each other in front of him under the pretense of dictating a circus act. There were times when I felt it was played a little too well--as I said before, the animal abuse is just too difficult to watch; I ended up crying so much before it even happened that I closed my eyes for the scene when he beats Rosie. Even the sounds of it were horrifying. Again, viewers sensitive to animal abuse should beware.

The movie is definitely worth seeing just for the sights and sounds of the circus, especially Tai the elephant. Towards the end, the film is touchingly handled, and I was able to connect with it emotionally in a way I hadn't for the book. I never thought I'd say this, but the movie was better than the book, in my opinion, and comes highly recommended from me!

In Which Trai Reviews 'Dearest Cousin Jane'

The Book: Dearest Cousin Jane: A Jane Austen Novel

The Author: Jill Pitkeathley

How I Found It: I'm sure it came up as I was searching Amazon for something Jane-related.

The Review: This is historical fiction, and the events of the book all occurred in real life. Thus, there will be some spoilers, although I'm not sure they can exactly be called spoilers if this was written based on true events. (It's like not telling someone the Titanic sinks because it would ruin the ending.)

Jane Austen had a cousin, the enchanting Countess Eliza de Feuillide. She was born in questionable circumstances--there are whispers that Eliza is the natural (i.e., illegitimate) child of her mother, Philadelphia Austen Hancock, and Warren Hastings of the East India Company. In Paris, at the age of 19, Eliza marries the Comte de Feuillide, Jean Capot, though Mrs. Austen is convinced he is a no-good adventurer.

Eliza defies convention, as she is free-spirited and often talks of improper matters in front of the impressionable Austen sisters, Jane and Cassandra, her cousins. Eliza particularly likes Jane, who she feels needs instruction in the ways of flirting and "husband hunting". Though Eliza herself is fun-loving, her life is marked by tragedy. Her mother dies of breast cancer. Her husband is guillotined in the French Revolution. Eliza has two miscarriages and her only son is epileptic and dies fairly young. Through all this tragedy, Eliza never loses her indomitable spirit, and eventually finds contentment as the wife of Henry Austen, Jane's favorite brother, who watches with the rest of the family as Jane begins to grow into her talents as a writer. Eliza lives almost to the publication of Mansfield Park, and when we leave Jane and Henry in one of the final scenes, Jane is just beginning to formulate her ideas for Emma.

I didn't know all that much about Eliza before I read this book; I knew only that she was Henry's wife and that she could have been the model for Lady Susan in the eponymous novella or for Mary Crawford in my second-favorite Austen, Mansfield Park (of which my opinion is not popular among Janeites). I am pleased to say that her life was fascinating enough to keep me turning pages throughout the whole novel. It is told from multiple viewpoints, all of which are related to the Austen family. Jane herself even narrates a few times. We get the story through direct narration, almost gossipy reports from relatives, and letters from one member of the family to another. (Pitkeathley apparently used some real letters and wrote some of her own. I haven't read all that many letters of Austen's, so I'm not sure which were real and which were imagined, but I suppose that's a testament to the novel's period authenticity.)

I liked reading about the story of Eliza and how she eventually came to be a full member of the Austen family, after rejecting both James and Henry once apiece. The story did a decent job of compressing many years of history into a fairly short novel--Eliza died when she was 50 and that's just about how many years are covered in the novel. The ending chapters are poignant, as Eliza succumbs to the breast cancer that claimed her mother, and Jane, with only five or six years left to live herself, gets the premonitory feeling that she should write as much as she can just in case. I will admit that I was somewhat teary-eyed as I read Eliza's assurances to Jane that she would live to write twenty more novels, and as Henry and Jane stand at Eliza's grave. Pitkeathley did a fine job capturing those emotions, and I suspect the story has personal importance for her, as she is a survivor of breast cancer.

I will admit that the novel was not perfect; it had its advantages and its drawbacks. The characters were all very well-defined and it was easy to tell them apart, a considerable feat since Austen had a very large family. It does sometimes get confusing to remember which brother and which wife is being referred to, but there is a character list in the beginning to help sort that out. The multiple narrators, while certainly a very interesting device (I've expressed my love for it before), sometimes dragged the book down. We would hear about a circumstance in one chapter and then the next chapter get another narrator's opinion on it--while repeating the same information we already received in the last chapter. This happened at least three or four times and I was most seriously displeased, as Lady Catherine would say. This repetition sometimes made the multiple narrators redundant and boring.

Also, though Jane asserts many times in the novel that she "does not write from life," many characters are made to strongly resemble those in her novels and suggest from where in her family she could have drawn those portraits. Mary Austen is very, very similar to Fanny Dashwood; Philly Walter to Mary Bennet or Mrs. Norris, etc. That did get a little distracting when all I could think was, "Well, she doesn't write from life, so why is [so and so] similar to...?" Many paraliterature writers have the tendency to do this, though, having characters resemble the ones in the Austen novels so that we think, "Oh! That's where she got it from!" Sometimes I like to think Jane could have thought of it on her own, but I guess it's perfectly reasonable for Pitkeathley to reflect the personalities onto Austen's family rather than just making up new characters for this sole purpose.

My other quibble is that the editing leaves much to be desired, which I understand was a frequent complaint about Pitkeathley's other novel, Cassandra and Jane. There are not commas where there probably should be, or there are entirely too many commas, or the quotation marks are badly displaced, among other errors. Since this book is published by Harper, a fairly large publishing outfit, I find that I cannot forgive it as easily as I would if it were self-published. (Self-published books are normally atrociously edited, or at least the ones I have come across are. Seriously, one of them did not correctly spell Aaron Eckhart's last name. It is not that hard to spell, and even if it is, it takes two seconds to pull up IMDb and check. Geez.)

So while the book was not the most perfect thing in the world, it is a perfectly acceptable tale of Jane Austen and one in which I believe many Janeites could find something to like. I would not recommend this to non-Jane fans, however--it might be difficult for them to keep track of Jane's family, and I imagine it wouldn't be as fun without background knowledge of the novels.