The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy
This book can be very simply summarized as “Watership Down but with elephants”. We follow a herd of African elephants trying to survive a severe drought and the relentless threat of poachers with all the worldbuilding of immersive animal lore and their language, mythology, rituals, social structure, history, hierarchy and family bonds.
That’s really what it is; that’s really what its trying to be.
But this is where it fails.
Watership Down worked because it never told you to care about rabbits—it just made you live with them, side by side, until their stakes became yours. The richer and more imaginative the elephant cosmology gets, the more it calls attention to itself as constructed—and once you're there, it’s hard not to see the author holding up cue cards saying “Sympathy now!” and “Protect the innocent!”
The White Bone wants to thread the needle of fully inhabiting an animal consciousness while also telling a compelling narrative. But rather than letting the animal mythology and language serve as subtle texture, Gowdy seems to foreground the elephant cosmology a bit too hard, as if she's afraid we won't take their culture seriously unless it's explained in detail. Which, ironically, makes it harder to suspend disbelief.
The novel is too caught up in its own invented cultural scaffolding to let the characters crack under it. They feel carved from ivory rather than clay—pure symbols with limited emotional elasticity. They don’t rage, panic, grieve in animal ways. They react as if they know they’re inside a myth, and that makes it hard for us to feel like we’re watching real beings we can care about as readers.
The end result is interesting but feels a bit flat.
