Elephant story is quirky, zany and tender
The Last Animal Ramona Ausubel Riverhead
If you could cross Anne Tyler's novels with strands of DNA from Michael Crichton's thrillers, you might produce this new book by Ramona Ausubel. From a taxonomic point of view, The Last Animal is a sweet, poignant descendant of Jurassic Park.
Such a strange literary creation sounds unlikely to survive in the wild, but in Ausubel's laboratory, it springs alive to explore questions that stump scientists and families, problems of the head and of the heart.
The novel opens in Siberia, which is a dark and cold place, but no darker or colder than Jane and her teenage daughters, Eve and Vera, have been feeling lately. A year ago, Jane's husband, a paleoanthropologist, died in a car accident in Italy. Before that, the family traipsed around the world searching for Neanderthal bones in French caves and measuring ancient eye sockets in Kenya. Determined to carry on her own research in paleobiology and to keep her daughters close, Jane brings the girls along on a field expedition to the frozen edge of the planet.
Ausubel captures these siblings in all their mercurial passions and desperate loyalties. The girls are witty and precocious, young enough to be crabby but old enough to understand what's at stake for their mom, the lone woman on a team of chauvinistic scientists. But a more generalized heartbreak haunts these fatherless girls.
Even Vera, 13, understands what's at stake. She's proud of her mom's work but can't shake the snake of existential worry curled around her. “It seemed hopeless,” she thinks. “It was perfectly possible that the planet would be unlivable in their lifetime.”
But a little miracle happens: While wandering around the Siberian mud fields, Eve and Vera stumble across a leathery carcass buried in the soil. After some frantic digging, the girls realize they've discovered a perfectly preserved baby woolly mammoth.
So begins a shaggy elephant story.
The quirky comedy of this novel constantly pushes back against the story's abiding gloom. The whole book is glazed with a thin layer of absurdity, a recessive gene of zaniness that keeps expressing itself when you least expect.
Jane, sick of being “just” a lab girl, strikes out on her own with a scheme to re-create a prehistoric creature. There's no use being coy when there's a 200-pound woolly mammoth sitting in the middle of the story. But once this giant baby — christened Pearl — enters the scene, what will happen to her and what she means are up for grabs. That's when Ausubel's story really takes flight.
Pearl's adorable, but as a fuzzy emblem of all species permanently lost, her cuteness is threaded with doom. For Jane and her daughters, the animal is a painful reminder of the loved one they can't bring back — every family goes extinct eventually. The paradox this novel confronts with tender sympathy and humour is how to love the time we have left.