Review: To The Elephant Graveyard by Tarquin Hall.

The story is interesting, educating, and fascinating. The author gives a great deal of information on the elephants in India. He starts out relating how mankind misuses and overdevelops a great part of the land that once inhabited the great Asian elephant. As a British journalist he heard of a large angry elephant was being hunted down because the elephant was going into small villages and at that time he had already killed twenty-eight people. That’s when Tarquin Hall thought it would make a great story to follow up on especially hearing that the great Mr. P.C. Choudhury, an experience animal hunter that looks into the diagnosis scenario of the situation to determine if the animal has to be put down, killing it, only if needed. Hall went to the area in India to meet with Choudhury and was able to convince him to allow him to be among the group that was headed into the rain forest and jungle to follow the path and pace that the elephant was last seen. Hall was allowed to go with strict rules he had to follow.

Now Hall was headed out to the area of Assam, India. He manages to be accepted into the selected group of mahouts and travels on an elephant for the first time and never stops asking questions. There was some suspense to the story with Hall’s questions about the mythic elephant graveyard that is answered and seen near the end of the book. He also learns throughout his adventure about the local Indian culture. Hall warms up to Choudhury and he realizes the kind of person he really was, a kind loving, gentle animal person not the beast of a hunter as he thought. This whole situation was serious to the entire group, even Hall himself. The elephant was a huge symbol in India and they were being pushed off their land and the poaching of elephants was also threatening the elephant population. With people like Choudhury, opposed to poaching and the misused land gave the reader a sensitive issue to think about.

When he talked about the hunted elephant Choudhury explains throughout the story how he stalks the elephant to find out why it is killing. He feels his way on the path of the elephant and creates a believing story of why this elephant has turned mean. No one in the group wanted this elephant put down not even Hall. It was so fascinating how Choudhury explained the life of this elephant as if he watched and felt what this animal had gone through. It really is a fascinating true story, it had to be heartfelt by any reader and the adventure that Tarquin Hall describes is intriguing. The story was a little wordy but the adventure was amazing. ( )

Tarquin Hall is a British journalist stationed in India. One day he hears of a story of a wild elephant on the rampage in the north-eastern province of Assam. Initially sceptical about the stories of the killer elephant he joins the hunter who has been appointed to kill the beast, Dinesh Choudhury. During the hunt Tarquin meets "kunki's" (tamed elephants), "mahouts", their caretakers, learns how to ride an elephant, and more than that, learns about elephant behaviour, the role of the elephant in Indian religion and mythology and hears of the famous yet mysterious Elephant Graveyard.
The story is set up as an adventure story. The hunters following the trail of the elephant, coming through villages where he has hit and killed, getting closer and closer. This makes it into the kind of book that you can't put away, because you want to know what will happen next. However, it is definitely not a story that glorifies hunting elephants. On the contrary. Still, the real problem of the elephant, its habitat that is seriously threatened by growing human population in India, remains a small detail in the story that is only expanded upon a little at the end of the book.

What can be said against this book? Well, in my opinion Tarquin Hall is not a very good writer. He tries to make his sentences literary and poetic which he shouldn't do! Because it doesn't work. I also felt that it was a bit too much of an adventure story of a young man instead of a story about elephants. However, the more than interesting story makes up for this. Elephants are fascinating animals and it is due to Mr Hall that I am sure I am going to look in to more books about this subject. ( )