Elephantasm by Tanith Lee

She hated him yet wanted to touch him.

As Natalie Merchant tells you in that song you'll hear in department stores, and as Ray Davies tells you in that song you'll hear here at MPorcius Headquarters, what people want in their entertainment is sex and violence.  And we here at MPoricus Fiction Log are no different!  Recently we went seeking our S&V fix in Dana Reed's 1988 Demon Within, but found the book quite unsatisfying.  So today we turn to one of the speculative fiction world's most adept wordsmiths, one of our favorites, the great Tanith Lee, and a book I recently bought at Wonder Book in Frederick, the 1996 paperback edition of 1993's Elephantasm. 

Well, Elephantasm certainly features some nasty blood-, urine- and vomit-spiced sex, sex that is ugly and quasi-incestuous, plus gruesome scenes of injury and death.  But instead of seeing it as primarily a sex and violence exploitation novel, I feel it is more accurate to think of Lee's novel as a woke social justice revenge fantasy (not that people were necessarily using those terms back in '93.)  Men mistreat women, the rich mistreat the poor, English people mistreat Indian people, and humans mistreat animals, and then the abused achieve a horrifying supernatural revenge!

I don't think Elephantasm is as fun or as beautifully written as those Flat Earth books I read last year; it is more grim, and less emphasis is placed on metaphors and images, and the climactic sequence is perhaps a little too long.  However, Elephantasm is certainly well-written and constructed, and full of little nods to Dickens, Conrad and Kipling that people will likely find engaging, so is easy to recommend.

Elephantasm up like 330 pages of text, and consists of five parts.  Part One takes place in Victorian London amid Dickensian squalor.

Teenaged Annie and her sister Rose were born among the middle classes, but their parents died and they now live with Rose's husband in a slum near the river and a homeless encampment.  Rose's husband, the physically beautiful but morally repulsive Innocent, lays around the flat all day reading the paper while Rose and Alice prepare his tea and, to make ends meet, take in mending and sew rag dolls; Rose also prostitutes herself, her posh accent has proven an asset in attracting gentlemen.  Innocent often spends all night out drinking, and that is when Rose breaks out her secret ouija board!  (Lee doesn't use the word "ouija," which I guess was coined in the period after that in which our story takes place.)

One day Annie is out on an errand for Innocent, and when propositioned on the street flees into an alley and finds herself in a shop full of exotic goods.  The proprietor, some kind of foreigner she comes to think of as a prince from India, insists she buy for a penny what he calls an amulet, a tiny ivory figure of an elephant--young uneducated Annie doesn't even know if elephants are real like horses or a fantasy like unicorns.  That night the ouija board seems to tell the girls, in vague terms, that they are soon going on a trip--maybe to India! 

After a night of drinking with his buddies, the Joyless Bugger, the Badger and Earbone, Innocent starts beating Rose; when he finds the elephant amulet it looks like he will start beating Annie, and Rose scratches her husband's eyes out and then kills him with a knife.  The fallen amulet floats on a stream of Innocent's blood back to Annie.

In scenes in court that feminists will relish, Rose is convicted of murder amidst dialogue from the fat and oily lawyers about how women are not trustworthy and perhaps need to be beaten to keep them in line.  Rose is hanged and Annie is taken under the protection of a female merchant who in the past purchased the rag dolls Rose fashioned.  This businesswoman hooks Annie up with a position--ostensibly as a scullery maid and seamstress--in the distant country house of the Smoltes.  In Part Two we are introduced to this house and its denizens and learn what Annie's real job is going to be.

Sir Hampton Smolte made his fortune in India.  He has a fascination with India, a mixture of love and hate--for him India is like a woman of great beauty and terrible evil whose charms he cannot resist.  Sir Hampton has a personal cook who learned to make curries while serving with him in India, and when he returned from the East like eighteen years ago he had the country house to which Annie arrives built in the style of an Indian palace; its interior and its grounds abound with paintings depicting Indian scenes and statues of Hindu deities.  Sir Hampton's wife, Flower, a former showgirl, blonde and voluptuous, now getting fat, spent some years abroad with her husband; she detested India's heat and food and smells and resents today the smell of her husband's curries and has had her private rooms decorated as far as possible in English style.  The Smoltes have three children whom Flower does not like.  The youngest at eighteen is cruel feline daughter Elizabeth--in keeping with the novel's Indian themes the idea is suggested that she was a cat in an earlier life.  (In one of several such creepy scenes, Elizabeth, after voyeuristically watching two members of the staff making out, notes how their kisses resemble her cat's devouring of a shrew it has presented her, and ventures to taste the raw mangled beastie herself.)  Elizabeth's older brothers are brutish Urquhart, who acts like a pig but has succeeded in making friends with local aristocrats and gentlemen, and sensitive, sickly and beautiful Rupert, the oldest, who when he isn't coughing acts like a too-cool-for-school hipster jerk, complaining about everything, including England--he'd prefer to be back in India.  We also meet many of the servants, each with his or her personality and quirks.

Annie washes dishes and sweeps for a while, but is soon elevated from the kitchen and given more pleasant quarters and more exalted duties; putatively, her job is to sew for Elizabeth.  (Beyond mundane work on Elizabeth's dresses, Annie is also commissioned by Elizabeth to sew on to undergarments the bones of the small animals her black cat brings her.)  But after Rupert, spying on Annie as she bathes, registers his approval of her young body, Annie takes up her main duties at the Smolte house--serving as the histrionic eldest son's sexual plaything.  As Rose was of Innocent, and Sir Hampton is of India, Annie is both drawn and repulsed by the beautiful, sensual, dangerous and cruel Rupert; a virgin, she is initially excited to be ushered into the world of sex.  But instead of a world of joy, Rupert inaugurates her into a world of pain, fear and disgust; Part Two climaxes with some quite gross BDSM sex as Rupert indulges the perversions that stem from his childhood relationship with his nanny ("ayah") back in India.  

Part Three starts with a flashback to India, to the time of Sir Hampton's first trip to the subcontinent, when he was still Captain Smolte, a scoundrel of a soldier in his early twenties sent on a disagreeable mission as a sort of punishment for his misdemeanors.  At the head of a dozen soldiers, he escorts an eccentric and corrupt government official, Withers, "into the green hell of the rukh" to an almost forgotten station near the palace of a Muslim raja..  At this age Smolte doesn't like Indian food or Indian women, but Withers assures him that curries, and maybe other delicacies India has to offer, can prove addictive:

"That's how it is with India.  You loathe it; then you take to it.  Then you can't get enough."

Chapter 1 of Part Three chronicles how Smolte becomes smitten by Indian food and an Indian woman, the Hindu sister of that raja, as he and Withers bring the abandoned British station near the raja's palace back into operation.  

The rest of Part Three is back at the Smolte house, where Lee expands upon her themes of revenge and of the inadequacy of the riches Smolte wrested from India to satisfy him.  Annie, perhaps animated by Indian spirits (she wears her ivory elephant around her neck, a mixed-race servant the Smoltes brought back with them from India having put it on a chain for her) turns the tables on Rupert, sexually dominating him, making him worship her.  Annie dastardly poisons one of her fellow servants, a girl who robbed her.  We see how the other gentry and aristocrats in the area look down on Sir Hampton as a nouveau riche who won his money in a disreputable way (they call him a "jumped-up knave;" "parvenu") and shun his house.  Flower Smolte, starved for society, hears of a performer who has a troupe of trained Indian monkeys, and hires him to serve as the main attraction to a big party she holds.  The monkeys initially behave, performing their elaborate tricks, but eventually get out of control and cause havoc; as with Annie, it is suggested they are possessed by some Indian spirit out for revenge on the Smoltes.

In Part Four, a flashback to Smolte's second trip to India, we get the inside skinny on why these spirits might want vengeance on Sir Hampton.  Smolte was drawn back to the subcontinent from England by letters from Withers promising tremendous wealth should he enter the service of the raja, who felt the need of a guard of British soldiers.  Smolte's new wife Flower joined him for this second Indian sojourn, and it is in India, at the remote station, that Rupert and Urqhuart were born and spent their early childhoods.  (Elizabeth was conceived there, but born in England.)  

Smolte gathers together and commands a company of white deserters and criminals with which to maintain order in the domain of the raja, and we see the origin stories of various members of the Smolte household (there are a bunch of characters in the novel whom I have not mentioned) and witness Smolte's crimes and learn the source of his wealth.  He and Withers loot forgotten temples in the jungle, with (it appears, at least) the tacit permission of the raja, but Smolte goes too far when he rapes the raja's beautiful virginal sister--the sneaky raja has (it seems, at least) been using the promise of his sister to manipulate Smolte, a promise that is just a tease and was never to be fulfilled.  The pious Hindu woman commits suicide by starving herself, and over a month after she is raped she dies and is cremated in an elaborate ceremony; a supernatural event at the cremation inspires the raja's people to rise up against Smolte, his family and his motley company of ne'er-do-wells and scum.  Smolte and his troops wipe out the raja's entire community, sparing neither woman nor child; Smolte himself shoots down the raja.

In Part Five a cataclysm strikes the Smolte household through Annie and the ivory amulet.  It starts with the amulet coming to life, slipping away from Annie and harassing Elizabeth, her black cat and the kitchen staff, an elephant small and nimble as a mouse.  The weather turns hot, the English woods become infested with Indian animals, a monsoon strikes--the estate is overgrown in Indian jungle, the house is destroyed, and a multitude of white people are killed in various ways.  Animal rights activists will cheer as the aristocratic and middle-class men leading a fox hunt fall prey to a tiger.  The Smoltes go insane and most of them die in agony; the ivory elephant, absorbing all the ivory in the house, grows to colossal size and plays a role in the death of Sir Hampton.

The ghost of Rose appears and informs Annie she is only her half-sister--Annie's father was what Rose calls a demon and Annie suspects was a supernatural Indian creature (it is hinted it was a rakshasha) disguised as an Englishman.  (Like in a Lovecraftian story, Annie has been of the alien "other" all along!)  Has Annie's entire life been directed by supernatural forces from the mysterious East, has she always been merely a pawn in a transnational anti-imperialist plot of revenge?       

The rukh, apparently miles deep, has surrounded the Smolte estate.  The only truly healthy and sympathetic character in the book (he loves animals! he comforts the dying! he spouts the wisdom of the East!) leads Annie and the rest of the handful of survivors out of the jungle and back into mundane England.  It seems that Annie and this one decent man, who is old enough to be her father, are going to become lovers and live happily ever after.

A solid novel about how the Victorians were a bunch of meanies full of well-done exotic supernatural horror business and a helping of gore and twisted sickening sex.  Thumbs up for Elephantasm.

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It is back to 1950s science fiction short stories in out next episode; see you then!