J.M. Ledgard begins his début novel from the perspective of a giraffe called Snehurka. Although Snehurka is born in Africa her development is distinctly Soviet. First she becomes aware of herself as she emerges from the uterus, then of her mother as she is licked clean, and finally of Socialist values as she is fed and scrutinized by CSSR officials. She overhears the Czechoslovakians explain themselves, "There is socialism in our method....Capitalists capture one of two giraffes, while we take an entire herd; because our intention is political, to issue forth a new subspecies."

Giraffe retells the true story of the 1975 slaughter of forty-nine giraffes in a Czechoslovakian zoo as an allegory for the failure of Communist social engineering. In Ledgard's portrayal, the capture of the giraffe herd is the final halfhearted effort of party officials to revive the nation's waning idealism.

Emile, a hemodynamicist and one of Ledgard's primary narrators, is the first to pronounce the "impossibility" of the giraffes. He is, of course, referring to their circulatory system; however, "giraffes are impossible" becomes an incantation in the novel. The giraffes are likened to mermaids as well as unicorns, and referred to as "creatures from a world of lesser gravity." Their alien nature is associated with the supernatural and mystical that Communism, with the advent of technology, aimed to destroy. The impossibility of the giraffes surviving the "climate in our CSSR" becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of belief and imagination in a Communist Czechoslovakia.

The metaphor itself is tired and Ledgard's heavy-handed symbolism fails to do much but restate the obvious; Communist bureaucracy suppresses creativity and imagination. Ledgard uses a number of similarly worn tropes to depict the captivity in which sensitive and intelligent individuals exist under Communism. Emile bemoans the landlocked nature of his country and longs for the freedom of the sea. Ledgard's least successful metaphor involves Amina, his other principal narrator. A sleepwalker, she charges her fellow citizens of never being fully awake. She calls Czechoslovakia "a country of sleepwalkers by day, who drink by night only as a lesser form of sleepwalking." If these metaphors are insufficient in conveying Ledgard's notion that delusion and destruction are inherent in Socialism, he drives the message home with passages such as the following:

I leap from the barge to the riverbank and sit with East German anglers, who set their lines at protractor angles into waters where there are no sardines, no salmon, but only eels searching upward and Czech-speaking vodniks drifting from one soul jar to another, free of the Communist mediocrity above, which is everywhere, even in the fishing rods about me, poorly made by some East German state monopoly, that threaten to break under the tug of the most inconsequential fish. There is no end in sight to the mediocrity: The socialist epoch would have itself extend, red-starred, into a distant future of centrally planned space colonies.

The didactic tone of Ledgard's prose makes it easy to dismiss this novel as just another, rather belated, critique of communism. His blatant metaphors obscure that which is most successfully portrayed in the novel, the stagnation experienced by the entire Eastern Bloc during the Brezhnev era. Emile and Amina are misleading narrators. The story that emerges through the actions rather than their exposition is far more complicated and interesting.

Ledgard would do better to stand his metaphor of sleepwalking on its head. The characters in this novel are not acting blindly — they are seeing but not acting. Cynicism and effeteness are the defining traits of all the characters whether or not they espouse communist values or question them. De-Stalinization is already twenty years in the past, the thaw has come and gone, and the suppression of the "Prague Spring" is still fairly recent in the memory of Czechoslovakians. The citizens of the CSSR are not ignorant to the abuse of government officials. Their cynicism is evidence that, on the contrary, they are supremely aware of both the fallacy of Communism and the price they will pay for disobedience.

The impossibility of the giraffes' survival in Czechoslovakia is evident to nearly all those involved in their capture and transport, yet each participant performs his part. Hus, the bureaucrat who oversees the transfer of the giraffes, is the only character who expresses enthusiasm about creating a "Camelopardais bohemica" to entertain the worker. This enthusiasm, however, is governed by self-interest rather than idealism. Hus is characterized as "a careerist" rather than an ideologue. Idealism has long since failed. The characters that populate Ledgard's novel are not delusional they are practical. They are fully aware that rebellion will lead only to the destruction of the little personal freedom they have retained. Jiri the sharpshooter who kills the giraffes says, "I am a Communist because I wish to remain in the forest" and later adds, "I hold to CSSR out of fear and am openly relieved at its banality." These citizens know that to retain their ounce of freedom, to be left alone to the woods and to the summer cottages where "the only regime is mushroom picking, moonshine, and card games," they must simply not participate in the public sphere.

The capture and slaying of the giraffes do not awaken the citizens of the CSSR to the brutality of socialism as Ledgard's metaphor appears to suggest. The slaying illustrates that when forced to act in defense of their private freedoms the clear-eyed cynics will be as brutal as the zealots.

Ledgard, a writer for the Economist, has clearly done a great deal of research in preparation for writing this novel, and where he fails as an artist he succeeds as a journalist. The conclusions Ledgard draws from the events of the massacre, as evidenced in his expository prose, are dangerously reductive. He is, nevertheless, faithful enough in recreating the events of the massacre that be is able to evoke the atmosphere of stagnation surrounding it. This accomplishment allows his novel to be more rich and complicated than his effusive narrators would suggest.

 

Tatyana Gershkovich is neither grotesquely tall nor laughably short.