The Magician's Elephant

By: Kate DiCamillo / Narrated By: Juliet Stevenson

Length: 2 hrs and 52 mins

More and more lovely with each passing Listen

I dunno, but I truuuuuly thought I’d enjoyed The Magician’s Elephant the first time I listened to it oh, like, aaaages ago. Really, tho’? THIS Listen, this 3rd Listen had me sobbing like a baby, my husband giving me the Evil Eye as he tried to quickly “Mute” his microphone during his business Zoom meeting. I’d stayed in the room, listening with earbuds, thinking I was going to like it as I had the first time, the second time.

Uhm, no… MORE… It kinda sorta crept up on me, this time the writing really came together with the AWEsome narration, and I found it to be a tale chockfull of magic, and power, and pathos, and healing galore. Which is amazing cuz, tho’ I’d been fond of it before, I don’t remember getting any of all those wonderful things the first couple of times I’d listened. And besides: How on blue blazes can The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane be topped?!?

Well, it can’t, so there’s that. But this landed firmly in between that marvelous audiobook and The Tale of Despereaux in my list of top three favorite audiobooks by author Kate DiCamillo—which means, I’ve currently listened to only three… but I’m looking forward to more, lemme tell you!

Orphan Peter Augustus Duchenne lives a dreary life in Baltese, where he is schooled by an aged wounded soldier. A chance encounter with a traveling fortune teller leaves him with the words: She lives!—and—Follow the elephant! which leads Peter to dreaming of a lost sister he believed to be dead, and the hope of being reunited with her… if only an elephant could be found…

Which leads us to a magician who summons an elephant to come crashing through the ceiling of the opera house where he’s performing for an ennui-ridden crowd of elites. The elephant crushes the legs of a Lady, the magician is jailed, and the elephant is confined first by the police, then by a Countess who wants to be the talk of the town this season. When Peter learns of the existence of the elephant, he joins a throng of gawkers to see her, to ask her how he might find his sister. To his dismay, the elephant has no answers, only the look of one whose heart has been broken: The elephant is homesick… she will die if Peter cannot help her find her way Home.

And so his quest changes, and we meet more eccentric and lovable characters sparingly crafted by DiCamillo (And maybe that’s the only place it’s lacking: The characters skate by, loosely drawn, each shimmering shades of all that is lost and broken in Life). We feel loss when we meet these characters, we feel how frightening, how damning! it is to have Hope. But then there is the little policeman with his ridiculously large mustache who asks the questions: What if…? And Is it possible that…? Add to this little bringer of light a starving beggar who sings haunting and beautiful songs, a blind dog who wishes to deliver that final most joyous of messages, a crippled carver of stones who can’t stop laughing, and a personal attendant who sees Just The Way things should be in the moment he remembers a little dog’s name, and we have a truly lovely story of the bonds people make in sorrow, the bonds they break in joy.

Juliet Stevenson has got to be one of the best narrators out there. And it’s probably due to her that I found the audiobook to be so heart stirring this time around (I admit it: I listened at x1 speed this time, something I NEVER do, so maybe that’s it?). She carries each and every character so well, with such a flair for voices and accents, and tho’ bless her heart she ain’t no singer, she brings the beggar’s songs to sweet life with how soul-felt each of his songs is. Then too, some of DiCamillo’s word choices here, the way she crafts each sentence, can come off as repetitious, but that’s where Stevenson does best: She makes each line come off as poetry, as though a mere story has become a living, breathing, heartbreaking poem.

Sure, not all the storylines are ended as neatly as we’ve come to expect from this author, but I do congratulate her on never going for the sunshine and flowers Happily Ever After for all her characters. Life’s simply not like that. So while there’s grand healing for some, it’s not necessarily in the cards for all.

Ahhhh, but what load isn’t lightened when one can forgive?

And whose Life isn’t better once it has soared above the earth, a heart full of Hope, beautiful, damning, awe-inspiring, Hope?