Starred review from April 17, 2023
James (The Tusk That Did the Damage) returns with a spectacular tale of creativity and colonialism drawing on the “Tippoo’s Tiger” automaton displayed in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 1794 Mysore, India, teenager Abbas carves intricate mechanical toys at his father’s furniture shop. After Mysore’s ruler, Tipu Sultan, learns of Abbas’s talents, he orders Abbas to help French inventor and clockmaker Lucien du Leze craft Mysore’s first automaton. Their “fantastical curiosity,” as Tipu calls the life-size wooden tiger capable of sound and movement, pleases the court. While under du Leze’s tutelage, Abbas meets Jehanne Martine, the biracial daughter of Tipu’s French armorer. Du Leze, Jehanne, and her father sail to France in 1799, and Abbas stays behind to tend his ailing father. His hopes to follow them are dashed by Britain’s bloody conquest of Mysore, and by the time he arrives in Rouen in 1805 to take up the apprenticeship he’s been promised, du Leze is dead. He reunites with Jehanne, who tells him the British have shipped the mechanical tiger to England with other looted artifacts. Abbas proposes an audacious plan to reclaim the object, believing its public display could make them rich and give them the chance to make their mark on history. There’s an unceasing exuberance to the prose, and James’s descriptions are endlessly witty (du Leze’s outfit for the tiger’s unveiling, an Afghani tunic and a shawl from Kashmir, is “an atlas of textiles”). Rarely is a novel so dense with painful themes also such fun. At once swashbuckling and searing, this is a marvelous achievement.
Starred review from October 1, 2024
James (The Tusk That Did the Damage) offers a sweeping historical tale, tracing the creation, search for, and reclamation of a gruesome yet ingenious automaton. In late-18th-century Mysore, India, 17-year-old Abbas is taken from his home to the sumptuous palace of Tipu Sultan, known as the Tiger of Mysore. There, he is apprenticed to the French clockmaker Lucien du Leze and tasked with creating an automaton of a tiger attacking a British soldier. Then Tipu's palace is looted by the British, and the tiger automaton is stolen. James's novel draws on a real automaton called Tippoo's Tiger, made in Mysore in the 1780s or 1790s and now displayed at London's V&A Museum. Narrator Maanuv Thiara's evocative voicework transports listeners to James's lushly described landscapes as Abbas travels through India, France, and England in search of the automaton, which has joined a collection of looted artworks in the English countryside. Throughout this lively, fast-moving story, James deftly explores war, love, colonialism, and racial and cultural identity with humor, wit, and finesse. VERDICT A piercing and thought-provoking must-listen. This is storytelling at its finest.--Whitney Bates-Gomez
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