The Elephant is Bradford, and 'a dream of a department store at the top of a hill so vertiginously steep it seems the whole building must break loose and roll down at any moment'. It is a man in the death business, and it is also his son, a self-confessed fantasist and liar who is named after a cricket field. It is about George Gershwin and The Beatles and a bonfire on the beach. About sleeping in coffins, Tetley bitter-men, the evil Schenk, a jar of pickled birds, cycling to Blackpool and back in 1931 and, fifty years later, 'sprinting down the prom at Scarborough acting how Fred Trueman put the frighteners on the Indians', had them 0 for 4 old man, oops, there goes another bouncer'. The Elephant has a dangerous wardrobe and a pearl lost in a game of marbles. It has a suave bad man called Charlie Laughton and a mad one called Twiggy Fawcett 'who carried no flesh on his bones and whose skeletal frame stalked moonilt cemetries with a spade filling in graves which had been dug in advance.; It is about versions of the truth, the mystery of names, sexual hysteria and a fear of not-feeling; about myths of family, of seduction, and of provincial England.
Most of all, perhaps, it is about emotional change, and about going to see the elephant, and that in tuhnr is a story of the relationship between a son, Headingly, and his prodigal father, Jack Hamer.
- ISBN10 0224030981
- ISBN13 9780224030984
- Publish Date 30 May 1991
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 27 October 2005
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Vintage Publishing
- Imprint Jonathan Cape Ltd
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 288
- Language English