Elephant Winter

Chris Knight is managing editor of the Canadian HR Reporter.

This sparking novel explores language and communication between mother
and daughter, the living and the dying, men and women, and humans and
other animals. The setting is a wild-game safari park in Ontario. Sophie
Walker’s mother is dying of cancer, and Sophie has returned to her
mother’s house next to the park to be with her. Over the course of a
winter, Sophie describes her life becoming entangled with a group of
elephants, their untalkative keeper, and a mysterious mute pachyderm
expert.

The elephants serve as a sounding board as Sophie grapples with her
feelings for the keeper and the pain of watching her mother slip away.
Several chapters present an “elephant dictionary” that Sophie is
writing. She compares the simple rumbles and honks to favorite snatches
of poetry, and writes: “The communal nature of Elephant does not
preclude the use of the language in a solitary way for the purer
pleasures of language ... a verbal elephant is perfectly capable of a
soliloquy, an apostrophe, a meditation, a prayer or, if you will,
talking to herself.” Reading these chapters, it is possible to believe
elephant-talk is as wondrous and complex as our own.

“If you listen they’ll tell you what you need to know,” says the
keeper, whose relationship with his charges is almost subverbal. In the
end, we are shown that feelings can be communicated by any two beings,
no matter how different they are, as long as the emotion is there.