Tale of a Tortoise

What to say about a novel whose point of view alternates between a so-called “IQ-challenged” narrator and a sentient tortoise? Such devices can be instant turn-offs for serious readers—they can smack of gimmickry and saccharine cuteness. Anthropomorphized animals and naive girls solving mysteries have so long been the province of children’s literature that it is difficult not to confront the text with prejudice. But in the case of Jessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise these fears are groundless: she enters the territory with great charm, and with few of the missteps that might have foiled a less talented writer.

If the fact remains that the novel will appeal to both young adults and their parents, the book is no poorer for it. Our heroine is Audrey Flowers, a simple young woman who is summoned back home to St. John’s from Portland, Oregon, because her father is in a coma, the victim of a freak accident. An early scene on her plane gives a strong taste of what is to come: mid flight, Audrey takes the gun off an air marshal and locks herself in the bathroom, believing she has thwarted a terrorist attack. As the co-pilot, the flight attendant and the air marshal (whose surname, in true Catch-22 fashion, is Marshall) try to persuade her that she is mistaken, the reader is made fully aware of Audrey’s eccentricity. The scene is full of whimsy and humour, and sets us up for a tale in which airports feature strongly and every manner of travel resonates with metaphorical meaning.

Audrey arrives home, into the care of her beloved Uncle Thoby, only to learn that her father has died. She believes it is because she was not there to make a dramatic speech at his bedside—because, as everyone knows, when one makes a dramatic bed-side speech to someone deep in a coma, he wakes up. In Audrey’s inner world, this kind of knowledge is rote. News of her father’s fate does not sink in right away: Audrey shies poignantly away from truly believing it, and it is to Grant’s credit that we are not directly told this, but rather shown it through Audrey’s actions. Compounding Audrey’s grief is the fact of what she has lost or left behind in Portland: a failed relationship with a rock-climbing boyfriend (aptly named Cliff ) and a beloved old turtle named Winnifred (formerly called Iris). Names play a big part in the characterization and word play in this novel, with monikers such as Flowers and Lionel de Tigrel reflecting the essence of their characters.

Winnifred shares the narrative with Audrey, the story jumping back and forth between them in checkerboard fashion. In children’s literature the use of talking animals creates a parallel world where the goings-on may mirror our own world, but, placed within a non-threatening realm, the trials of life are made less frightening. Animals have also been used in the opposite way, especially in the literature of adults: to amplify what is most frightening about our world, to show us its flaws in a context removed from ourselves so that we see all the absurdity of the human lot. This is exemplified in such novels as George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Richard Adams’s Watership Down.

I’d argue that both are on display in this novel (the former more than the latter). Audrey is a woman struggling to cope with the reality of her grief, and implicit in this novel is the notion that Winnifred’s whole identity is a construct Audrey has imposed on her for her own emotional reasons. In that respect, the talking turtle makes the world a smaller, more manageable place for her. And the turtle’s perspective is also crucial to our full understanding of Audrey’s emotional landscape: while Audrey can be endearingly simple, the tortoise has decades of lived experience and knowledge behind her, and can analyze situations with a perspicacity her counterpart lacks. Winnifred shows us what is really going on beneath the surface of human relations. There is particular poignancy in hearing about the end of Audrey and Cliff’s relationship through Winnifred’s eyes:

The reader gets the full force of Audrey’s grief without her personally relaying it or physically wallowing in it. Winnifred bears witness in an oblique way. She gives voice to the dramatic irony surrounding Audrey, showing us with more accuracy and emotion those things her owner can barely express.

That is not to say that Audrey is not a full-fledged narrator in her own right, brimming with life and humour. The narrative is written with an almost total lack of external detail, giving it an intense interiority that grounds it in pure consciousness. This can make it feel too gossamer at times; the reader cannot always see or hear the surroundings. But it also has the effect of bringing us so snugly into Audrey’s mind that it becomes impossible not to feel her as a fully formed character and empathize with her. She narrates with a strange lack of quotation marks, and it is as if the punctuation reflects her inability to both show and interpret emotions. But like the autistic narrator of Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, this emotional bewilderment and seeming innocence very often lead to some piercing observations. After watching her friend Byrne Doyle with his dog, Audrey concludes, “I understood. Byrne Doyle kept his happiness outside him. Because he was so busy on the inside with worry about elections and whether the people in Poland liked him. All his happiness was stored outside him in a woolly dog.” When a Swiss friend greets her with a double-cheeked kiss, she observes, “I think the reason the Swiss kiss like this is to delay for as long as possible looking into the eyes of the person they are greeting.” The novel is rife with these quirky, quietly clever insights.

In fact, the book’s flaws are flaws of excess. The narrative is held together less by a compelling story than by character and motifs—i.e., airports, flying, travel as a state of being—that, at 412 pages, it feels too long. This induces a kind of reader fatigue, as many of the scenes begin to feel repetitive, especially with so little physical detail to ground them. The book would not have lost any of its charm at two thirds the length (and in fact might have gained something). And while the puns come fast and smart and are genuinely funny, there are times when the jokes ring too cute. A carry-on bag becomes a “carrion bag”; a coma is a “comma.” The problem with such overly sweet humour is that it is almost like the writer is not trusting the subtler carpentry of her characterization in other places. What is most remarkable about Audrey—all her wonderful vulnerability and charm—is better revealed in less hyperactive ways.

But these are minor flaws; the novel is amusing and charmingly written. It is reminiscent of the work of Miriam Toews, Mark Haddon and Jonathan Safran Foer in the intensity of its word play and the charm of its narrator. It is a novel that will appeal to many—a bright, sparkling read in these bleak times.