I deeply love The Only Harmless Great Thing. The fictional overlapping of the very real stories of the radium girls and Topsy the elephant is made into so much more than the sum of its parts by the way Bolander weaves it into a speculative past by showing us the future it could have built. The Only Harmless Great Thing is a beautiful, heartbreaking, deeply re-readable story full of all the things Bolander does gorgeously: thoughtfulness, stark imagery, and rage.

I received a digital ARC of this book from Netgalley.

This is a strange, beautiful little book. The narrative moves back and forward in time in a world where elephants are sentient. First, they're brought in to replace the famous "Radium Girls," because their larger bodies can handle more radiation. (If you haven't heard of the Radium Girls, do give it a Google. It's a sad, grotesque story of radiation poisoning and corporate greed.) Then one of the Radium Elephants, Topsy, kills a man and is sentenced to death. This is also based on a real thing. Topsy was a circus elephant that killed a man who fed her a lit cigar. (There seems to be some dispute over how many people Topsy killed, and why, although it seems pretty likely that she was abused in some fashion.) Topsy was electrocuted to death, and if you're into that sort of thing, you can see the footage of her demise online. In the next narrative, a scientist tries to convince an elephant matriarch to allow scientists to make elephants glow in the dark, to warn people of the far future about the presence of radioactive waste. And in the far future, we hear from the glow in the dark elephants about how they remember their history.

This is such a heartbreaking book. Elephants become the symbols of, and the lens through, we reckon with how humans have exploited each other and our planet for generations. There isn't really any justice for these characters, but their long memories allow for the possibility that someone may someday hear the truth.

Published by Tor.com on January 23, 2018

The Only Harmless Great Thing reimagines the history of the Radium Girls, factory workers who suffered from radiation poisoning after painting watch dials with a luminous paint made from powdered radium. In Brooke Bolander’s alternative version of the story, U.S. Radium responded to litigation by enlisting elephants to do the painting. Thus, the Radium Girls become Radium Elephants. Part of the novella is, in fact, narrated by elephants.

The novel also borrows Topsy from history, the elephant who was electrocuted at Coney Island in a spectacle for invited guests. As a circus elephant, Topsy killed at least one person, no doubt with good reason. Both moments of history remind us of how incredibly cruel the human race can be. Factory owners are cruel to workers; hunters and showmen are cruel to elephants.

The Only Harmless Great Thing links those two extremes of wickedness in a fantasy that gives elephants the ability to communicate with sign language. Two humans are important to the story. Regan, a Radium Girl who taught Topsy to paint, is dying of cancer caused by radium in the paint brushes she was instructed to “point” with her lips. She’s waiting for the insurance settlement that will be her legacy to her family, although her dying mother probably won’t benefit from it. In the meantime, she comes up with a plan to avenge her death and Topsy’s execution.

In the present, Kat is dealing with the problem of nuclear waste. She has hit upon a scheme to use glowing elephants as permanent markers to warn people away from disposal sites. The elephants, not necessarily keen on the idea of exposing themselves to radioactivity (again), have their own agenda.

The elephants in the story have their own folklore, and the novella acquaints the reader with some of it. The Only Harmless Great Thing is in part a celebration of storytelling, as an elephant tale reminds the reader that stories are meant to be told, not hoarded. The story can also be viewed as an allegory of motherhood. Females outsmart males every time (at least if they’re elephants); mothers pass down such wisdom to daughters. Elephant folklore teaches that women can be just as strong and cunning as men, and much more patient, but while bull elephants fight each other, mothers use their strength for a purpose: to educate, to preserve a sense of community, so that future generations will remember the lessons of the past.

Describing prose as lyrical is almost a cliché, but in this case the description is apt. The story is strange, but it works, in part because it is so beautifully told, and in part because the lessons it imparts are both timely and timeless.

RECOMMENDED

[Note: review will go live on the 1st of March]


The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander is a novella released by Tor.com and is the first longer thing of the author's that I've read. (She also wrote the Hugo shortlisted story "Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies", which I reviewed here.) Based on this excellent novella, I certainly intend to read more of the author's work in the future.

In the early years of the 20th century, a group of female factory workers in Newark, New Jersey slowly died of radiation poisoning. Around the same time, an Indian elephant was deliberately put to death by electricity in Coney Island.

These are the facts.

Now these two tragedies are intertwined in a dark alternate history of rage, radioactivity, and injustice crying out to be righted. Prepare yourself for a wrenching journey that crosses eras, chronicling histories of cruelty both grand and petty in search of meaning and justice.

From the cover and the kind of vague blurb, I didn't know what to expect from this book. What I got was an intricately woven set of stories about radium girls, radioactive elephants and elephant folk tales. This novella is set in an alternate timeline where, even a century ago, elephants have been found to be sentient and humans are able to communicate with them via sign language. But they are still exploited and oppressed — by circuses and by the radium watch factories.

The main story here is of the elephant Topsy and the dying radium girl Regan, who has stayed on at the factory to teach the elephants how to paint the dials. Both of them are already doomed. Their story is framed by elephant folk tales and informs a future (present) debate about using glow in the dark elephants as markers for nuclear waste sites. I admit it was that last element that first really grabbed me but in the end all the elements of the book came together nicely. If anything, the conclusion of the future storyline was the least satisfyingly conclusive, while the others had clearer endings.

Anyway, if you don't hate elephants or women, I highly recommend this book. You don't have to come into it knowing anything about the radium girls or the history of elephants in the US (I certainly knew nothing of the latter, and only learned that there was a real elephant named Topsy — who in real life never worked in a radium factory, shockingly — in a blog post by the author after I'd read the book). I will be recommending it to all and sundry at the slightest provocation.

5 / 5 stars

First published: January 2018, Tor.com
Series: No
Format read: ePub eARC
Source: Publisher via NetGalley

I didn’t actually know much about this before picking it up: only that there was an elephant, and it somehow involved the Radium Girls. I loved the bits from the perspective of the elephants, the stories they tell: it might be a little much at length, but in little doses it was cleverly done, figuring out the way they’d think and communicate. I wasn’t in love with the modern-day plot of making the elephants glow (it seemed a little goofy to me as an idea, so I didn’t get into the character who suggested it), but the interaction between Topsy and the Radium Girl who trained her was poignant and fascinating.

Overall, it’s an interesting idea and there’s some definite gems in the writing, but I’m not sure how long it’ll stay with me. It didn’t quite come together for me, the three threads of narrative.

I loved this so much I read it twice in one day. The juxtaposition between the elephants and the humans is phenomenally well done. This one is a keeper. Highly recommend.

The Only Harmless Great Thing is a tough one for me to digest, and I'm not quite sure what to say about it. The narrative round-robins its way through multiple points of view: we have, at the book's core, an alternate history take on the Radium Girls, factory girls who were killed by radiation poisoning, who are being replaced by elephants; we have a story strand set in the future; and we have the myth of it all, stretching across the span of existence, as told by elephants relaying the stories to others.

For a novella that's just shy of 100 pages, there's a lot going on here. Simultaneously, the work feels somewhat unfinished and anticlimactic, and despite there being enough information conveyed across the multiple points of view to piece together a nearly complete whole, the book just kind of fizzles to a stop.

Still, it's a briskly paced novella with enough interesting conceits to have kept me ensnared. The relationship between Regan and Topsy, a Radium Girl and her replacement elephant, was particularly well done and posed an interesting dynamic. On the writing front, Brooke Bolander is a heck of a wordsmith, and this story is beautifully written. After only a few pages, I could immediately see why she's been a finalist the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. She is seriously talented!

Ultimately, I just think I'm not the target audience for this book. It's beautifully written, has some great ideas, but unfortunately it never quite gelled for me.

The Only Harmless Great Thing is one of the most unusual books I've ever read. It's alternate history, maybe it's even set in an alternate universe, as here elephants can talk with human through sign language.

Its premise is brilliant in its simplicity and weirdness: what if we combined the tragic story of Topsy the elephant with the tragic story of the Radium Girls? It's a great idea, really - in its very few pages, this novella manages to talk about both the exploitation of women and animal abuse in US history.

It's weird and sad and angry, but can a story with this premise not be?

When I started it, I had no idea of what was going on, but after a few pages I understood that it follows four different PoVs, and at least three different timelines.
• Kat is a scientist who is trying to find a way to hide nuclear waste so that no one will want to come near it. Her idea involves glowing elephants, who are, after the "Topsy incident", tied to nuclear radiation in the collective imagination.
• Regan is a dying Radium Girl who is teaching elephants how to work with the poisonous paint. She knows she's teaching them how to die, but she needs money - or, maybe, there's something she can do to change things before she dies.
• Topsy is the elephant at the center of the tragedy that will change everything.
• Furmother is a character in the elephants' folktales. What they value the most are stories, the stories that elephants separated from their families will never get to tell.

The Only Harmless Great Thing is also really short. Too short for me to really get to know the characters, and too short to have a conclusion that didn't feel rushed. I felt like one of the plotlines didn't get closure.
I also didn't love the writing - it wasn't bad, it was... confusing, and while that made me feel the anger of the characters, it was difficult for me to get into the story.

I feel kind of bad about my rating after seeing so many raving about this, saying how tragically sad this is, but I didn't feel anything at all while reading this.

It's a typical "it's me, not you" case because the writing style wasn't for me at all and had me more confused than anything else. I just couldn't get into it and was waiting to actually feel something but I felt completely disconnected to it the events of the story from start to finish.