ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

This debut novel came my way because Theresa at Theresa Smith Writes and Sue from Whispering Gums had both reviewed it, and I wanted to see for myself how it handled the issues it raises.  This is the blurb:

Hannah Bird has just arrived in Thailand. Disoriented and out of her depth, she meets Deven, a fierce and gutsy Australian expat who sweeps her into thrilling adventures rescuing elephants.

As they head deeper and deeper into the fraught world of elephant tourism, their lives become tangled in ways Hannah never imagined. But how far will they go to save a life?

Hannah is about to make a critical decision from which there will be no turning back, with shattering consequences.

The Breaking piqued my interest not because I am sentimental about elephants but because it explores the ugly side of mass tourism and the role of outsiders in ‘righting wrongs’.   Hannah is the stereotypical naïve young tourist, escaping the minor troubles of a comfortable life by visiting an ‘exotic’ culture on a shoestring.  As fellow Australian Deven in exasperation soon makes clear, Hannah has not bothered to find out anything about the country she is visiting.  Deven, who has issues of her own, clearly enjoys being the possessor of knowledge about Thailand, and takes the clueless Hannah under her wing, introducing her to the culture of street life and teaching her scraps of Thai.  (Later on, Deven volunteers as a teacher in a village school so teaching must be in her blood.)

But Deven also introduces Hannah to the Worthy Cause, i.e. the rescue of elephants which these days are used less as workhorses and more to entertain the ‘bucket list’ type of tourist with circus performances, tricks and rides.  Deven is passionate about the rescue of these animals which suffer greatly throughout their very long lives, and as the novel reveals in graphic detail, the elephant’s submission to their mahout is achieved through the process of phajaan i.e. breaking its spirit with extreme cruelty when it is very young.  (Though you can infer some of what goes on from the Equipment section, none of this is alluded to in the bland article about mahouts at Wikipedia which has been edited significantly to remove references to phajaan, see Verification in the Talk section).

With sexual attraction emerging between Hannah and Deven, the pair join an elephant rescue operation, putting in long hours of back-breaking, dirty labour.  They clean the elephants, and they clean up after them; they feed them and they spend hours preparing their food.  They tend their wounds and they rejoice when elephants take their first tentative unchained steps. They get to know and love individual elephants and they find that the work they are doing is very satisfying.  But that is not enough for Deven.  She knows, (as everyone else involved in these projects in Asia and Africa does), that the problem of elephant exploitation and cruelty is systemic and that they are making a difference only to a small number of individual animals.

(Though the novel is not explicit about this, the depiction of the ‘yobbo’ Aussie tourist shows that activism also needs to tackle the pressure exerted by this type of tourist.  That needs to be done not in Thailand but in the source countries of the tourists who arrive expecting tricks and rides.  Making ethical tourism the only kind of acceptable tourism is a project for wealthy western countries.)

Big, the Thai in charge of the rescue project explains that changing the culture and way of life in Thailand is a slow process, and this is where a careful shift in characterisation occurs.  Deven has been the leader: strong, intelligent, decisive, street-wise and morally persuasive.  Her interactions with Thais show a respect for Thai culture.  She speaks enough of the language to get by in everyday situations; she dresses respectfully; she eats what they do; and she derides Hannah’s Western-tourist expectations about the kind of accommodation they are given. But Deven is also impulsive and she sees things in black-and-white; as right or wrong.  Hannah has been a clueless follower: getting lost; getting ‘ripped off’ in bargaining; needing an interpreter; naïve about the way elephants are trained.  However, it is Hannah who sees the nuances that pass Deven by: that there are families with hungry children who are dependent on the income the elephants provide and that well-meaning outsiders taking the moral high ground can do more harm than good.  Over the course of the novel we see Hannah emerge from star-struck follower happy to go along with things without argument, to making tentative steps towards voicing her dissenting opinions, and finally to taking charge when the crisis occurs.

It took longer to read this book than I expected because some of the animal cruelty scenes left me wanting a break from the reading, but overall I admire this author for bringing these issues to attention in a nuanced way.  The author has ‘skin in the game’: she has worked on rescue projects in Thailand and in the Afterword she suggests rescue projects which would welcome financial support.  But the novel as a whole represents the complexity of activist involvement in these projects, and the novel itself is a powerful way of promoting ethical tourism.

Thanks to Sue and Theresa for bringing it to my attention.

Author: Irma Gold
Title: The Breaking
Cover design: Kim Lock
Publisher: Midnight Sun, 2021
ISBN: 9781925227819, pbk., 265 pages
Source: Kingston Library