New York Review of Books Review

KATE DICAMILLO'S new book, "The Magician's Elephant," though intended for young readers, has enough, and then more, of weird parable and enigmatic puzzle about it to bring it into the Borges precincts, if not right into the heart of Calvino country. A magician, working in the old city of Baltese - a Central European town perfectly evoked by DiCamillo's sentences ("the small shops with their crooked tiled roofs, and the pigeons who forever perched atop them, singing sad songs that did not quite begin and never truly ended") and Yoko Tanaka's chiaroscuro drawings - has made a comic and sinister mistake. Intending to call down a bouquet of lilies in a concluding trick, he has instead summoned an elephant, who crashes through the roof of the opera house to land in the lap of a rich woman named Madam LaVaughn, paralyzing her. The magician is arrested and imprisoned, while the elephant is at first detained and then displayed in the chateau of the local countess, where she is cared for by a "bent and twisted" mason named Bartok Whynn, who was injured in a cathedral accident. The elephant becomes the talk of the town, and the pages in which DiCamillo catalogs Baltese elephant mania are among the funniest and most charming in the book. ("The street vendors sold, for exorbitant prices, chunks of plaster that had fallen onto the stage when the elephant made her dramatic appearance. 'Cataclysm!' The vendors snouted. 'Mayhem! Possess the plaster of disaster!'") Then, through the work of strange dreams and associations, the elephant becomes the centerpiece in the longings of an assortment of seemingly unrelated and lonely people: a fatherless boy training to be a soldier; a girl - could it be his lost sister? - in an orphanage; an old lady and a blind ex-army dog. The true matter of the story is the slow interweaving of this thwarted and longing group, who will come together around the elephant on a snowy night. All of this might seem oddly gray and heavy material to land in the laps of children, even fans of DiCamillo's sad and smoky earlier books. And, to be sure, though "The Magician's Elephant" offers pleasures for the nighttime readaloud - chiefly in the variety of accents it demands for the many nicely distinguished voices - it is more a book for quiet corners and Christmas evenings than for bedtimes. DiCamillo writes here in a register entirely her own, catching not the whimsical-fabulous note of earlier masters for young readers, nor the jokeyrealistic one that has too often taken its place, but instead a mood of sober magic that unfolds into something that can be called, without pejorative, "sentimental," meaning straightforward and heartfelt. The style may evoke Calvino, but the substance belongs to Christmas. Though the spell the story casts depends on its grasp of human cruelty (both the blind dog and the boy have in different ways been wounded by war), when at last the participants are memorialized in a cathedral relief - "Each person has a hold of the other, each one is connected to the one before him" - we feel in the presence of a bright, reassuring truth about community. A dull but significant book might be written on the attraction, here as elsewhere recently in children's literature, of this particular fantasy cityscape: the Middle European town with its culture of soldiers and countesses and traveling magicians and long service to the emperor. Perhaps we now share a knowledge, implicit but never entirely articulated, that these tragic invisible cities, darkened by history, have become the perfect setting for modern fables. But however much truth that study might contain, the magic of DiCamillo's stories is that while they have the dignity of literature, they're never unduly "literary." Young readers are caught up in the fable before they know they are being fabulized at, trapped in the poetry of the allegory without any idea that allegories are set as traps by authors. Kate DiCamillo has a gift, inequitably distributed among writers of all kinds, of eliminating the obvious and still egging on the reader. She writes beautifully but thinks simply. The purity of her prose - the reader goes from paragraph to paragraph delighting in the wonderful simple sentences - only adds to the winsome purity of her vision. Her faith in her own images (an elephant in snowfall in twilight) has once again given us a light but potent fable, and a moral: we are all alone, and sometimes it takes the untimely appearance of an elephant to bring us together. Adam Gopnik is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His new children's book, "The Steps Across the Water," will come out next year.