Leaving Time
Jodi Picoult
Ballantine
REVIEW: Jennifer Crocker
Meet Alice, a researcher from America who is in Africa studying elephants. She has wandered slightly off course in her original work and has become fascinated by the emotional life of elephants, and how they react to mothering, or alomothering where the herd behaves in a certain manner when a female is in calf or has just given birth. Not all of her colleagues are too keen on Alice’s new fascination, which is seen at best as “soft” science, at worst as kookiness.
Alice is about to meet the man she will marry, another elephant fanatic who owns and elephant sanctuary in New England. She returns to New Hampshire and starts a life with her rather labile husband and a new baby.
Now meet Jenna, Alice’s teenage daughter, who really needs to know whether her mother, who is now missing, and has been since an accident at the sanctuary, is alive or dead.
You’ll also be introduced to disgraced psychic Serenity, who has fallen from grace and lost her spirit guides, and Virgil, a retired cop and washed-up private eye, who is far more keen on finding the mystery at the bottom of a bottle of booze than helping Jenna to find out what really happened to her mom on the night that someone died at the sanctuary.
This is essentially not a book about elephants, although you will read a lot about them in the novel. It’s the story of the relationship between a mother and a daughter, and the author is quite firm on this point. In fact she says that the elephants entered the scene only while she was on safari in southern Africa and had already decided that her next book would be about the bonds between mother and child.
Jenna is determined to find out the truth about what happened to her mom. Her dad is of scant help as he is locked away in a psychiatric unit, having become just ever so slightly mentally unstable.
Through the story of how Jenna persuades Serenity and Virgil to join her in her desperate hunt for her mother, indeed in her search to find out whether her mother is even alive, Picoult takes the reader through a journey on what it means to be a mother.
Without giving too much away, it often seems through flip-backs in time written in the voice of Alice that the elephants were doing a better job of it than she was with her baby daughter. Alice does not come across as an enormously sympathetic character. She is self-absorbed and often appears to forget that she even has a child, but perhaps that is too harsh a judgement of her, and one that should make us ask whether it is only the mother’s job to raise a child?
The character of Serenity is a wonderful one, she is bowed and broken, but still slightly sassy and for some reason she takes to Jenna. Her first reaction on meeting her is to tell the young teen to take a hike, but she becomes involved in the story. She has failed at a glittering career and there is a sense that she sees finding out the story behind Alice’s disappearance as a way back to herself.
Jenna’s voice in the story is extremely authentic, you can see the young girl struggling to find out what happened and feel her anger that her grandmother, with whom she lives, doesn’t want to discuss the accident.
If you are a regular Picoult reader, and an awful lot of people are, you will know that there is almost always a twist in the tale. There most certainly is in Leaving Time.
Does the twist, which I did not see coming, work? Hard to say without giving it away, but I would say almost.
I have to be honest and say that I don’t think it is the author’s best book, but it is readable and thought-provoking. An ideal book to take on a plane trip or to the beach.