IRMA GOLD The Breaking. Reviewed by Amy Walters
Canberra writer Irma Gold brings her passion for elephants to her debut novel.
After losing her job as a receptionist, Hannah flees to Thailand where her money will go further. Here she encounters Deven, a fellow Australian expat working as a teacher, whose passion is saving elephants. She convinces Hannah to join her on official projects to rescue enslaved elephants, and subsequently the pair also embark on an unofficial rescue mission with disastrous consequences.
Initially ‘a cocktail of malarial paranoia’, Hannah relaxes into the work of feeding rescued elephants and cleaning up after them. Although she is also witness to the cruelty inflicted on these land-based leviathans, the work and the camaraderie lulls her into a false sense of security. Gold’s taut, precise prose captures the atmosphere in characteristically understated terms:
The previous day we’d seen a baby elephant push over a concrete pylon intended for a new building. So cheeky, so playful. We’d never imagined at the time the devastating power a fully grown elephant – hurt or angry – might unleash.
Gold has worked with rescued elephants throughout Thailand, and is an ambassador for Thailand’s Save Elephant Foundation. Along with Thai phrases, trenchant observations are woven throughout the narrative, from the diet of the elephants (‘There were hundreds of [watermelons] but would only see the forty-two elephants through one and a half days’) to the ravages of global inequality (schoolchildren burn themselves trying to bleach their skin white) and the ignorance of Western tourists who pay for rides on tortured elephants.
George Orwell famously wrote an essay about the time he killed an elephant while working as a colonial police officer in Burma; by the time he came across the bull, its must-driven rampage had calmed and it was munching on grass in a paddy, looking ‘no more dangerous than a cow’. A crowd, however, had gathered, and in order to save face, Orwell emptied the contents of two guns into its body. Orwell writes:
As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant – it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery – and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided … Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly.
The climactic scene in The Breaking evokes Orwell’s experience. After encountering a young bull chained in the jungle, Deven hatches a plan to free it, and enlists Hannah to help. Confronted with the wreckage of their well-intentioned actions, Hannah knows that they should make financial reparations to the elephant’s owner, but Deven is adamant that this will only result in the enslavement of another elephant. At this moment they confront another leviathan: the global capitalist system that facilitates both their presence in Thailand as comparatively wealthy westerners, and the exploitation of elephants by poor families.
Orwell claims to have developed a disgust for imperialism while working for the colonial police, but that does not prevent him from referring to the Burmese in racist terms as ‘a sea of yellow faces’. At the outset, it was tempting to read The Breaking in a similar vein; although Thai phrases are worked into the text, the broken English of the Thai characters can sound like a parody, an interpretation assisted by the description of tourist souvenirs, including a mug with the slogan ME ❤️ THAILAND LONGTIME.
However, the tourist gaze is the point. Ultimately, being able to work on such projects is a result of privilege, the irony of which is not grasped by Candy, a Canadian volunteer who, when faced with inadequate plumbing at their accommodation, extolls the health benefits of cold water showers, ignoring the fact that for many Thai families lack of access to hot running water is not a choice. The elephant is an object of awe, but being near to them doesn’t automatically result in a personal epiphany. Deven has to teach Hannah to recognise problematic practices, as ‘[u]p close the elephant’s skin was a whole landscape. You could get lost in the looking.’
Enslaved elephants are ‘broken in’ – rendered compliant – as calves through brutality. However, Gold renders the elephants as fully fledged creatures, rather than one-dimensional symbols of global injustice. When Hannah and Deven remove the manacles from their ill-fated elephant, at first it does not know how to move naturally, continuing the bunny-hop its chains had forced it into. Nevertheless, it ultimately reverts to its instincts, rather than showing anthropomorphic gratitude in response to their kindness.
Whereas the media often treats young adulthood as a frivolous and self-indulgent stage of life, Gold astutely captures its agonies. In particular, she takes youthful idealism seriously, legitimising the quest of the two protagonists to find a way to live that does not simply capitulate to the status quo. But as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Cruelty will make or break you, but perhaps being broken is preferable to being made indifferent – although to survive, you do need something to hold on to:
I let out a long breath. Below us the city was crinkled with seams of light. I thought about everything that had happened there. All the beauty, all the ugliness. I wanted to hold on to the beauty.
Irma Gold The Breaking MidnightSun Publishing 2021 PB 272pp $29.99
Amy Walters is a Canberra-based writer and reviewer. She runs the blog the Armchair Critic, and her reviews have also appeared in RightNow, Kill Your Darlings, The Big Issue, ArtsHub and Meanjin. Website: https://armchaircriticoz.wordpress.com/ Twitter: @CouchCritic18
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