Toksvig, a very interesting woman, is now the author of a very
interesting book about woman. Whistling for the Elephants concerns
Dorothy, a ten-year-old oddity from what would now be termed a
dysfunctional English family. But this is 1968, before family
secrets were aired in public, when restraint, stiff upper lips and
'not in front of the children' were the order of the day. Father is
physically unable to raise his voice above a whisper; Mother rarely
leaves her bedroom except to travel, in which case she never leaves
her stateroom. Dorothy, left to her own devices, her brother being
dispatched to boarding school 'because he had been clever enough to
be born with a penis', assumes boy's clothes, a short back and
sides, and the ability to enjoy her own company. This all changes
when financial ruin causes Father to sequester the family in
small-town suburban USA, a move which causes Mother to retreat
further into pills and finally escape, and Father to drown his
sorrows permanently in the drinks cupboard. Salvation comes in the
shape of a run-down zoo filled with a half-crazed cast of
anachronistic but strangely powerful women, all of whom accept
Dorothy for what she is. Or at least for what she is capable of
becoming. The fight to save the zoo becomes the fight to save
Dorothy. Toksvig has retained the imagination of childhood with the
acerbic wit and gleeful irony of the writer and performer we know.
There is such a gallery of eccentrics, including some of the most
anthropomorphic animals you'll ever meet in grown-up fiction, that
the story often becomes confusing. However this is a minor carp
because I loved this book and found its climax and Dorothy's
triumph an exhilarating journey. Review by Maureen Lipman, author
of 'Lipreading' (Kirkus UK)
There are two basic types of animal in Nature's Kingdom. The first, like lions and turtles, produce many offspring and simply hope that some will survive. The second, like elephants and people, produce one or two at long intervals and make great efforts to rear them. My mother belonged in a class of her own. She produced two at short intervals and made no effort to rear them whatsoever.
Thus Dorothy, aged ten, finds herself making her own way in Sassaspaneck, New York in 1968. Her English father, who never talks above a whisper due to a youthful injury with a cricket ball, has tucked her and her mother away where the potential for embarrassment can be limited. All the other children in town have gone to camp, so Dorothy must provide her own entertainment. She comes across a small, faded zoo on the outskirts of town, and as she begins to get to know the eccentric group of women who live there she begins to discover a world way beyond the one she has glimpsed so far.
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