rev. of A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga by Julia Whitty
A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga
Stories by Julia Whitty. Mariner Books, $12.00 paper. Reviewed by Jessica Treadway.
By all accounts, Julia Whitty is a human being, one who makes documentary films about animals under the sea. But reading her debut collection,
A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga, you might begin to wonder whether these creatures had gotten hold of Whitty’s notes — and perhaps her laptop — and written some of these stories themselves.
Take the title story, which opens the book. Told from an omniscient point of view, it chronicles the lives of a Pacific Island’s royal family through nearly two centuries, all of which are attended by Tu’i Malila, a turtle, a reptilian witness to the births, deaths, joys, and sorrows of the country’s kings and queens and their offspring. We have the privilege, thanks to the author’s courage and talent, to inhabit the tortoise herself, and as implausible as it may sound, Whitty pulls it off. Tu’i Malila is the informal keeper of the family’s history for several generations until her own death at nearly two hundred years old, and even then the islanders sit for decades beside her giant carapace, “probing the old scars, cracks, nicks, and chips, the hieroglyphs of history.”
The story, which alternates the tortoise’s point of view with those of human characters, prepares us for the second tale in the book, “Lucifer’s Alligator.” Here, the narrator is a female orca, who speaks for herself and all the other animals at Ocean World, where their livelihood depends upon their performances. The animals try to coordinate a rebellion and win their freedom. They use different means: the manatees refuse to learn new tricks; the penguins pluck out their own feathers. The story’s narrator and her partner try to resist having sex so as not to reproduce, but temptation overtakes them, and Baby Shobu — the first orca born in captivity — only succeeds in causing Ocean World’s attendance to skyrocket. But when Shobu is removed to another amusement sea park, its mother, our narrator, is so grieved and vengeful that she attacks her trainer during a show, throwing her through the air until her bones break, “until I felt her acknowledge that the water, the ocean, this primordial bed, is a place
devoid of human limits, where absolute emotion binds with the sea like sunlight . . . There is no taming of this stuff.”
The amusing “Darwin in Heaven” offers as its premise just what the title promises: the evolutionist in the afterlife. Aside from these, the book’s stories feature living human characters and their experiences of internal and external drama, including a deep-sea diver whose work replicates his near-drowning experience as a child; a family on safari in Botswana, whose Land Cruiser is charged by a lion; a man who, while driving, witnesses a woman either jumping or falling off the Golden Gate Bridge; and a woman who traces her psychic lineage from the death portrait of an infant ancestor.
A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga reflects clearly its author’s knowledge of facts about nature and wildlife, but it is really Whitty’s compassionate depiction of emotional life in all its forms that makes these stories resonate. It will be a challenge to some readers to adapt to the fact that they are being addressed at times by animals and a dead person. But the reading result makes the adjustment more than worthwhile.
Jessica Treadway is the author of a novel, And Give You Peace,
and a story collection, Absent Without Leave and Other Stories.
She teaches at Emerson College.
