The Elephant

The son of a British undertaker tells of his painful relationship with his father, in a coming-of-age story about lying, cheating, stealing, sexual hysteria, and the truth in provincial northern England during the sixties. 15,000 first printing.

This skillfully told, darkly comic novel progresses from a colorful picaresque--densely woven with brilliantly macabre, hilarious details--to a poignant story of a father/son reconciliation. Jack Hamer, a mustachioed Valentino employed as an undertaker in the North England city of Bradford, embezzles a sizable booty in empty coffins, fakes his own death and returns home 16 years later to the astonishment of his grown son. Like his father, Headingley Hamer has a well-developed talent for lying--one suited to his occupations as journalist, seducer and narrator of the story. Reunited, father and son engage in scandalous exploits in an effort to "see the elephant"--a phrase coined by soldiers in the American Civil War to describe "the excitement, the strangeness, and even the charm of battle."286 Those who must be conquered are women, especially each other's, and the two men engage in a heady Oedipal struggle to out-seduce each other. By the tale's end, however, Headingley has transcended the myth he has felt "doomed" to live out--repeating his father's mistakes. Rayner ( Los Angeles Without a Map ) manages to transform this self-conscious, protean narrator into an ordinary man who tells a moving truth.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A Yorkshire journalist finds himself overdrawn at the Bank of Morality as he competes with the mythic image of his lying, boozing, womanizing father; Rayner (Los Angeles Without a Map, 1989) dishes out loaded material with surprisingly little impact. Narrator Headingley (named for a cricket field) Hamer comes on strong with a voice that teases, crackles, and compels throughout the first chapter: an invented pickup scene; fast, sharp ruminations about morality; an account of childhood with an undertaker-father (who, during a death shortage, fights for his market share by sabotaging his competitors' hearses) and with a sister ``who read the stories of Edgar Allan Poe as if they were newspaper reports.'' Hamer senior has an obsession about ``going to see the elephant''--his code for pursuing risk and emotional extravagance through megalomaniac lies and gestures, criminal connections, and femmes fatales. When his wife leaves him, he lies in a coffin crying and tells the children that she's died. But, alas, once past the opening, Rayner can't maintain his grip, and the story goes flat in spite of orgies, a murderous villain, a faked death, father and son ``corking'' each other's women, and even a scene in which Headingley and his brother corner the old man and try to kill him. Rayner's narrator often addresses the reader, explicitly seeking to seduce. At first he comes close to scoring, but as his account degenerates--becomes long-winded, confused, even tedious- -it's ultimately easy to say no. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.