Elephant Moon by John Sweeney: book review

Elephant Moon (2013) is set in Rangoon, Burma (Myanmar) from December 1941 (after Japanese forces bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbour near Honolulu in Hawaii) to early 1942.

English school teacher Grace Collins has been working in Burma for 20 years. Four thousand people are killed during the Japanese Christmas Day air raid on Rangoon, but the school and everyone in it were safe. As the Japanese Imperial Army prepare to enter Burma, the British colonial rulers and the Americans prepare to evacuate.

However, 62 school children – half-castes of Burmese women and foreign men – are not on any country’s evacuation list, nor are they acknowledged by Burma. They are to be abandonned, with no-one to look after them.

Grace decides to lead the 62 children to the safety of British-ruled India, 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres) away – through jungles, mountains, and rivers in the tropical rain – with malaria, illnesses, and the threat of Japanese soldiers.

At first, their journey was in an old bus, until they see a herd of 53 elephants going to India – 45 adults and eight calves. Grace and the children travel with Sam Metcalf, formerly of the Burma Teak Corporation, and a handful of ‘elephant men’ transporting the elephants across the border to India on behalf of the Burmese Ministry of Agriculture. The children make a game of it by naming the elephants, and these activities juxtapose the brutality of death and murders on route.

Through hardships, and times when the travel becomes too difficult for humans and elephants, the handlers contemplate killing the elephants – but it was the elephants that triumphed and led the children and everyone to safety.

This is fiction, but it is based upon truth – elephant men rescuing refugees from Burma in 1942 after the Fall of Rangoon.

Not well-written (for a former BBC reporter), but a nice story about the dignity of elephants and the brutality of humans, as well as the sheer perseverence of the small band of evacuating travellers through extreme challenges.

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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