Review of 'Elephant Complex' by John Gimlette

Published in Ceylon Today

Title: 'Elephant Complex - Travels In Sri Lanka'
Author: John Gimlette
Non-fiction
Travel writing 

Published: October 2015 

This book has a paradoxical cover. The title is baffling, and at first glance inexplicable. A Sri Lankan military officer, head down and gaze averted, walking towards us in the foreground, away from a beached and rusting giant military ship, damaged and listing, situated in the littoral, midway between the sea and the beach: a surrealistic parody of the picture postcard view of Sri Lanka that tourists often have offered to them at the outset of a visit to this country. My first thought was that this would be a book about the debris and rubble, both physical and psychological, of the recent Civil War. And it is. But it also deals directly with 'the elephant in the living room' - or in this case - the elephantine issues  looming in the picture postcard landscape, which we expect promotional literature to gloss over.

        There is not an actual elephant in sight, on the cover! But the writer explains the reason for his choice of title in his introduction. This is a book about not only what the writer sees and experiences as he travels the length and breadth of this island, but a story which he narrates, in episodic structure which makes the 475 pages easy to digest piece by self-contained piece, and ponder as you go. This is a well-wrought narrative, in which the writer both observes, and comments, in an insightful and interesting way, on the landforms, the habitat, the people and the customs he witnesses. 

      What is an 'Elephant Complex'? A history-laced, geographically-influenced situation-specific psychological condition which seems to be offered as an insight into the condition of the entire land of Sri Lanka, and its native inhabitants. Complexes are psychological paradoxes. Paradoxes are apparent contradictions. And resolving those contradictions is arguably the purpose of the human race, as we struggle with our mortal restrictions, and our immortal aspirations, in the human condition which we share in such varying ways. 

      I was reminded of the best definition ever made, of this broader human 'complex', from Alexander Pope's 'Essay On Man', written almost exactly 300 years before this book, at a time when English colonisation of this land was starting to ramp up and take hold. 

It is this wholistic observation of humanity as entangled in a cryptic webbing of mortality, immortality and matter that Gimlette offers us. Facing a dense and impenetrable conundrum, he refrains from slashing a path with judgmental truisms, stereotypes and put-downs. He manages to identify and occupy a 'middle state' himself, neither insider nor outsider of this Resplendent Land. An observer but never wholly a believer. Unsentimental, but able to connect where the interstices allow a person of insight and instinct and compassion to see things others more acquisitive or vainglorious have failed to notice.

  In the Introduction to this maze of a book, Gimlette sets out his personal navigational overview: 'Unsurprisingly, elephants have loomed large in the island's history... Perhaps the wild elephants say more about the complexity of this Island than anything else. It's said they follow the same paths all their lives, and from generation to generation. These paths are everywhere, and are often unknown to human beings. This means that Sri Lanka is densely criss-crossed with invisible corridors that have remained unchanged for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Sometimes an alimankada, or elephant path, won't be used for a while, and people will forget that it's there. But once the elephants are back on their path, there's little that will divert them... All that's clear is that, in the collective elephantine mind, there is a great plan of this island.
   Maybe the human mind works in the same way. Looking through Ceylonese or Sri Lankan history, it never feels quite circular. Rather, there are a recurring series of points of arrival and departure, with everything between lying disrupted and broken. Civilisations appear and flourish, and there's a great surge of progress before it all suddenly vanishes. No one is quite back where they started, and yet the same story will begin again, perhaps somewhere else. It's as if the island's history is a dense mesh of lines and pathways which... simply have to be followed. The issues and the protagonists have barely changed in thousands of years, and always there's that same sense of obstinacy and destination driving them along. Perhaps these pathways exist in some great and mysterious map, or perhaps it's just a state of mind, an elephant complex.'

From the suburb of Tooting in England, where he had observed immigrants from Sri Lanka settling, and practising their cooking and worshipping and the cultural rituals which were familiar to them, in a transplanted form, Gimlette researched the historical and cultural accounts of the island, and embarked on an unfolding and kaleidoscopic quest. His technique was immersive, to say the least.

     He described his self-imposed mission as 'daunting'. It involved a resilient self-discipline: of consciously NOT seeking simplistic resolution or trigger-happy imposition of order onto what he comes into contact with. I find his self-awareness and realism refreshing, as he tells us, in retrospect: 'What lay ahead was not the search for comprehension but a battle with perplexity'.

    The result of this battle is a book which offers us non-vicarious and open-ended experience, rather than self-aggrandising pronouncements. And Gimlette came here prepared to listen to a variety of people, and to see, degree by degree, beyond the surface, of a culture which is freighted with complexity. He achieves this successfully because he did not presume to 'solve' the paradoxes or penetrate the mysteries, but has the resilience and endurance to accept the contradictions as they present themselves, identify them and hold his ground while exploring them.

   Gimlette's narrative style is impressionistic in its vividness but detailed rather than sketchy, and he keeps it interesting by varying his syntax, modalities and registers, to reflect and keep in step with the variety of his experiences. His anecdotes edge us into the best seats in the house, by degrees, and his commentary is neither overpowering nor opinionated.

    Each experience has its danger, its humour, its flashes of beauty and dullness and we are introduced gradually to the cathartic distilled fusion of the mild form of pity and terror that it produces in him. His descriptions of both the people he meets by appointment, and encounters by chance, and who share their travails and observations with him, are pithy, and edged, but largely benevolent.

  His sound-bites and one liners act as mini summings-up, adding zest and variety to the complex way he sees and writes. His ability to record direct speech and give a sense of the dramatic idiom of those with whom he converses is riveting. His assessments of the former rulers of the land would probably have been considered treasonous just a few months before the book was published, and certainly while it was being conceived and written. His investigative forays take him into some dark territory, into the undersides of the picture postcards, and into landscapes of the human mind which are the inversion of the promotional images.

     The great appeal of this book is that we travel alongside him, not as an armchair traveller but as a mobile companionate conversational partner. His erudition does not burden us, or over-complicate the conveyance of his meaning. His 'Further Reading' appendix is clear and helpful, but not annotated, and the references to research in the individual chapters are not painstakingly footnoted.

   Gimlette's account makes one factual error: he refers to the University of Kandy, when it should be cited as The University of Peradeniya.

   Irreverent as his approach is, at times, this is not a hatchet job. The text is charged with goodwill.  On the back cover, the author is described as one who 'seeks the soul of a country that is struggling to free itself from trauma and embody an identity to match its vitality, its power and its people'.

  He has certainly enlarged his own mind to respond to the paradoxes presented to him by his experiences in Sri Lanka, but I believe Gimlette himself would not presume to say he was seeking the country's soul. Rather, like the elephants of old, he was seeking to make a path of his own through a country in which people lived with whom he shared some time and experiences for a while. Writing this, he seems to have found that his new path was leading him to tread some ancient overt trails, and that uncovering these has left him personally unharmed but not unscathed.