Customer Reviews

The Tower, The Zoo, and The Tortoise: A Novel

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The humor the author writes with never diminishes the heartbreak the characters feel, and I think I liked this most about the book. I felt like the author's main message was, "Life's tough, but it does go on, and finding humor and love along the way helps."

The cast of animals and the stories about the history of the Tower and its prisoners (and ghosts) is interesting and fun without distracting from the lives of the beefeater, his wife, and the many other characters. All of the characters have their heartbreak to deal with - for some it's loneliness, for another it's feeling abandoned, and for others it's suffering the grief of the death of a loved one. Just about any hurt we might have to deal with in life is presented with ways to cope and heal illustrated in the characters' lives, often with humor and honest emotion. The way the characters deal with their problems and help one another to find something new to try when one idea has failed, is not just funny, but heartfelt, creative and genuine.

There is more to the story than life at the Tower. There is another world to be explored at the Lost and Found, where Hebe (the wife of Balthazar, who is appointed the one in charge of the queen's new animal menagerie) works. Although several small stories take place simultaneously, it's easy to follow each story and the intersections with other characters. I also liked how Hebe's passion for her work ends up helping her in her own life: She meets friends who help her find something she's lost in her life - hope.

The ending felt perfect. Resolution, realization, a plan one worried didn't work the way he wanted it to worked better than he thought. This book satisfied more than I thought - it was deeper, more thought-provoking and had more substance than just a light read. I ended it feeling a bit more hopeful and aware about life's mysteries and quirkiness, the value of finding humor to get through the rough patches, and treasuring the animals that help me along the way.

Everybody knows about the Beefeaters in the Tower of London, of course, but it's unlikely you ever knew one personally. In this light- hearted novel you will meet the denizens of the Tower: Beefeater or Yeoman of the Tower Balthazar Jones along with his Greek wife, Hebe, are barely holding on to a marriage gone stale.

We are introduced to the Reverend Septimus Drew, the Tower parson, who secretly pens erotic novels under the pen name Vivienne Ventriss. We meet Ruby Dore, the sexy barmaid of the Tower's pub Rack and Ruin, who was born "slithering" on to a kitchen floor because the resident Tower doctor would not leave his Monopoly game at a crucial moment in play to attend the crucial moment upstairs. And there's the black-gloved villain, the Ravenmaster, who looks after his flock of vicious black birds, one of which recently sent a tourist to the hospital when the unfortunate man tried to pet the bird. And there's Arthur Catnip, the Ticket Master and his voluptuous girlfriend Valerie...

Hebe Jones works at the London Underground Lost Property Office and tries to unite the careless public with their left-behind objects which include, along with hundreds of umbrellas, a kidney transplant, an urn of ashes labeled "Clementine Perkins" and a yellow canoe.

We cannot overlook Mrs. Cook, the 180 year old tortoise belonging to Balthazar Jones and who lost her tail to one of the ravens. We briefly meet in retrospect the Jones' little boy Milo, who dies at age eleven and with him dies the spirit of the marriage, only dregs are left. At this point in time there really aren't any happy campers among the Tower personnel, trapped inside those ancient circular walls.

Elizabeth II has arrived at a momentous decision: all the exotic creatures constantly being more or less dumped on her royal head would be housed at the Tower, which had been used as a menagerie for centuries. There isn't any enthusiasm behind Tower walls over this bombshell of the Queen's but who are they to resist the will of the Monarch? However, Hebe Jones finds the menagerie the last straw, packs a bag and leaves her husband who has been hand-picked to be the reluctant director of this latter day Noah's Ark. Even old Mrs. Cook the tortoise, disappears.

But they learn something from the animals foisted upon them, these human denizens of the Tower."The softness of the reclusive ringtail possums who fall asleep in their arms"; the albatross who has lost his mate and is mourning; the bearded pig who chases a grapefruit around like a soccer ball; the Jesus Christ lizards who can walk on water and even the little Etruscan shrew with his velvet nose. The animals, who all need care, take the humans out of themselves and thinking instead about the welfare of the various critters in their charge.

True love will find a way over rocky roads and thorn thickets. Will Hebe come back? Will Mrs Cook find her way home? Don't miss this heart-warming tale, written with great charm, in which the spirit of the little boy Milo weaves the story together and brings it to a close.
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I've never read anything like this wonderful, warm and wacky book. Set largely within the Tower of London, the book is packed from start to finish with fun and quirky characters and scenarios. In the midst of the array of intertwining narratives, the history of the Tower of London is revealed throughout. Overall, it is just a delightful book.

The story follows Balthazar and Hebe Jones; he is one of the famous Beefeaters who staff the Tower of London, while she is a clerk at the London Underground's Lost Property Office. The couple lives in the Tower along with the other Beefeater families, and they have suffered a tragedy in their lives which is a thread that is slowly revealed throughout the book. They are struggling with their 30-year-old marriage while going about their daily lives surrounded by eccentric characters who provide some much-needed levity to the book. In the meantime, all manner of interesting objects turn up at Hebe's Lost Property office and this provides another round of fun and funny anecdotes.

This book was such an unbelievable pleasure to read. At times it seemed like the story was going to float off into the giddy ether, only to be guided back by the steady hand of the author. It struck the perfect balance between hope and sadness. I absolutely loved this book and would recommend to anyone.

Balthazaar Jones, Beefeater and overseer of the menangerie at the Tower of London, and his wife Hebe, employed by the London Underground's Lost Property Office (so specialized that it has everything up to and including an Egyptology section), occupy Salt Tower on the grounds of the Tower of London. Still reeling from the loss of their son, Milo, a subject so painful that they cannot bring themselves to discuss it, their marriage has become increasingly static over the intervening years. They are surrounded by a quirky cast of characters, some notables being Hebe's coworker, Valerie Jennings, a woman prone to finding herself costumed in inappropriate garb at the most inopportune moments and the Rev. Septimus Drew, curate at the Tower and writer of erotic fiction. What the characters all have in common is that Stuart has made them out to be immensely quirky (though perhaps Hebe not so much so as the rest) and immensely lonely. And that is the duality of this book: it is at once a quirky, and sometimes even silly, read, but it is also a work about the profound nature of isolation when one is surrounded by many people.

It's hard to review this book without using the word "quirky" a lot: the characters are quirky, the setting is quirky, the repeated use of historical trivia is quirky, the objects stored at the Lost Property Office are quirky, etc. It's a matter of personal taste how much quirkiness one can take; some will find it delightful, some will tire of it. It's a delicate balancing act, too, to balance this theme of unusual circumstances and people against a very real and very profound sense of isolation in modern day society, when human contact is inevitable but can be meaningless, misinterpreted, or fleeting. Balthazaar Jones finds society with the animals more "real" and easier to deal with than fraternizing with fellow humans for this very reason: they don't put the same emotional demands on him that fellow members of human society do.

In the end, I was somewhat conflicted about who I would recommend this book to. Would I give it to friends who like a good, light read with unusual characters and situations, or would they find the persistent themes of alienation and the theme of the strain of Milo's death to be off-putting? Would I give it to people interested in books about alienation in modern society, or would they read the quirkiness as silliness that undercut the more serious themes in the novel? Right now, the novel sits on my shelf, not yet lent out to anyone, because I can't resolve this issue. The question of hitting just the right audience for this one is complicated.

In the end, Stuart is doing a delicate balance between humor and profound themes of living in modern day society. It's not an easy trick to pull off, and I admire her for taking it on, particularly in such an unusual way, in such an unusual setting. It's quite a unique idea, very creative. You'll be thinking about this one for a while after you read it.

I've been struggling with how to review this book for a while. On the positive side, Ms. Stuart is very skilled at evoking place. When I visited the Tower of London and discovered that the Beefeaters actually do live there, I wondered about how comfortable they were. It's nice to have that question answered. The other locations in the novel were equally well-drawn, especially the ones in the London Underground Lost Property Office and quite believable.

If only the characters had been. Frankly, I got tired of the quirkiness--not quirky in the Flannery O'Connor sense, but they were almost twee--and the first half of the book was a slow slog. The effort in making a plot out of the actions of such odd characters showed, but the story took off during the second half and I did find the ending moving. I just couldn't forgive the characters. I don't think I'll want to read another book by Ms. Stuart. This one didn't work for me, but your results may vary.

At first I thought this was another one of those quaint novels featuring wacky English eccentrics. After all, it's about a man named Balthazar Jones of all things. He's one of those retired soldiers who works at the Tower of London, the ones we know as Beefeaters. His Greek wife Hebe works in the London subway's lost-and-found, and they live in the Tower with their 104-year-old tortoise. He collects rain samples; she find that annoying. How cute. Then I read the bit about how their only son died under mysterious circumstances some years before the novel opens and how they have been unable to discuss it or support each other through the tragedy. Not so cute.

Still, "The Tower, the Zoo and the Tortoise" does a remarkable job of handling that material without bogging down into soap opera territory. This brings us back to that English eccentricity; I wonder if such a story could be set anywhere other than England and still retain that lightness of touch. With all due respect, for instance, how serious can a story possibly be when so many of the main characters dress in that outfit? It looks like some designer got a job in a clown-costume factory and couldn't quite remember where to put the accordion pleats. (Just take a look at the nearest bottle of Beefeater gin if you're not sure what I'm talking about - that's the dress uniform, but the daily uniform looks like a sort of depressed version of the same getup.)

Besides the clothing, the story also includes a clergyman who writes romance novels in his spare time, the man who spends his days taking care of the Tower's collection of ravens, the lost-and-found's other employee who alleviates her boredom by trying on the false beards people have left on the trains, and a few dozen other oddballs. Then you take another look and realize that they're all, without exception, looking for love. That's a nice touch from the author, who presents us with a genuinely loving couple in crisis as her main characters.

At which point we learn that the Queen has decided to restart an ancient tradition by moving all her exotic animals - the ones that foreign leaders have presented to her - from London Zoo to the Tower. She wants to have the Beefeaters set up a menagerie on the Tower grounds, like the one that used to be there in previous centuries. And on top of all his other problems, who gets to take care of these animals and birds? Balthazar, that's who. Well, a man needs a hobby.

If there's a weakness to this novel it's that from this point onward, the outcome is pretty much of a foregone conclusion. Just about all the characters are people of good will, and we all know what happens to people of good will in a romantic comedy, no matter how many obstacles they have to get through. This is a quirky, touching, sometimes moving romantic comedy - there's a child's death involved, for goodness' sake - but a romantic comedy nonetheless.

The author intelligently loaded in some structural weight to balance the lightness of her materials. Most noticeably, everyone in this story has some connection to the Tower of London, and that shared background provides the characters with some dimension, some life outside of the romance machinery. They didn't just drift into this story by coincidence; they were there already. A romance, like any fiction, is an artifice, but things like the common setting make this one seem more natural.

Another structural stroke that lends this confection some weight is Hebe's activities on behalf of the London subway's lost-and-found. She and her colleague don't just collect lost objects and take advantage of them - reading the books and diaries, trying on the clothes, trying to open the safe - they also look for the owners and return the things. Some of the people they encounter in this endeavor have stories of their own to tell and contributions of their own to make. They even have something to say about what's happened to Balthazar and Hebe.

Still, although this novel is more than a piece of cotton candy, it remains a romantic comedy. On the other hand, "Pride and Prejudice" is also a romantic comedy. What makes that one great, and this one good?

In the end, of course, you'll have to figure that out for yourself - there may even be those among you who think that "The Tower, the Zoo and the Tortoise" is great and "Pride and Prejudice" good, although if that's your opinion you and I are going to have to discuss sports or television shows rather than literature when we meet. My sense is that the respective quality of this novel and others has to do with a couple of things, plausibility and imagination.

Ms. Stuart has done a very fine job in this work, but no one really lives like her characters - even, I suspect, the real Yeoman Warders of the Tower. The greatest danger they face is sadness; painful but bearable. The characters in "Pride and Prejudice" face the real possibility of homelessness. Those in "Tom Jones" face public humiliation or domestic violence. Those in "Catch-22" face actual death. All very funny, partly because the stakes are so high. As has been said before, when someone in a silent movie slips on a banana peel, it's funny because you can't see the bruises, but you know the bruises are there. This novel doesn't quite reach that level.

But let's not take that whole business too seriously. All it really means is that "The Tower, the Zoo and the Tortoise" isn't a classic. Not yet, anyway - only time will tell. Meanwhile, this novel is very funny, often moving, and in the end triumphant. Wait until you learn, in the last line, what that tortoise accomplishes.

Benshlomo says, If it bends, it's funny - if it breaks, it's not.

I found this book to be very slow going at first. The long descriptive passages with no dialogue or even action seemed to violate the writer's rule of 'show don't tell.' The skipping around between past and present and between characters with no warning was often unsettling and disorienting. I would just find myself being pulled into the life of one character when I was suddenly thrust headlong into a different scene all together.

Many of the characters in the book were intriguing with their various quirks and charms. However, I just couldn't understand how some of them fit into the main story. There seemed to be many little side-stories along the main one of Balthazar Jones and his wife, Hebe. I kept waiting for a stronger connection between them but in some cases those connections never appeared. Some of them simply felt unfinished at the end of the book. In fact, I was even wondering whether a main question was going to be answered as I was getting to the final few pages of the book. Luckily it was.

Despite the difficulties that I had with this book, I did end up enjoying it. It certainly isn't one that I will read again and I definitely wouldn't recommend it to everyone.

This is a tough book to categorize and review. It's easier to say what it's NOT- it's not a collection of animal stories ala Gerald Durrell. Yes, there is a nearly 200 year old tortoise and yes, the re-introduction of the menagerie at the Tower of London is an important catalyst. But the book is more about the people, with the animals serving mainly as something for the characters to react on. I could not help but hear ""Eleanor Rigby" ("All the Lonely people....") as the soundtrack for most of this book.

I'd say it's a little like one of those BBC "daytime dramas" that us Americans find puzzling and fascinating at the same time, with just a dash of Faulty Towers thrown in.

Certainly the characters are both interesting and unusual- Balthazar and Hebe Jones, the Reverend Drew, The Raven Master, and Valery Jennings, Hebe's co-worker and partner at the London Underground Lost & Found office. Actually, I found the stories about that office and it's trove of fascinating items to be every bit as interesting as the main story set in the Tower of London. I hope we have a sequel set there!

The Tower itself is a character also- it seems like it's hardly a bed of roses for those who live and work there.

It's not anyone's "usual cup of tea" but I think you'll like it. Give it a try.

Julia Stuart came up with an absolutely ingenious setting in "The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise." Who could resist a book about a modern day couple living in the Tower of London - especially when he works as a Beefeater (or, more properly, "Yeoman Warder") and she works in the London Underground's Lost Property Office?

Living in the Tower involves special challenges. How does one convince a delivery service that the address is not a joke? How does one create a welcoming, warm home when there is aging graffiti scratched into the walls by desperate prisoners? Can Balthazar Jones continue to answer tourists' unending questions about the history of torture in the Tower without losing his mind?

Hebe Jones and her coworker Valerie Jennings do not simply catalog and store items left behind on the Underground, but actually attempt to track down some of the owners. Their noble efforts provide the opportunity for many interesting subplots.

As intriguing as the location and occupations are, the characters are even better. They are unique and likable, and they have wonderful names, including Balthazar Jones, Arthur Catnip, and the Rev. Septimus Drew.

I thought about the characters and their situations long after finishing the book. It was a great read.

This is perhaps the best book I have read all year. It is amusing in its cast of characters and animals yet also sincere in its expression of the various emotions felt by them. The book is written so vividly and because of this, the reader is able to see the characteristics and the human-like tendencies of the animals without it ever turning too "cutesy." By far my favorite animals were the bearded pig and the albatross, but none of the other animals were lacking in character. The Lost Belongings Counter at the London Tube is a charming parallel story to the Tower of London story as well.

The various love stories and grief in the book just reach right to the core of human emotion. The author doesn't lay it on too thick, and yett the emotions jump off the page at you. The conclusion of this book is perfectly executed -- a nice wrap-up without overdoing it, and since you become so invested in the characters and animals, you truly feel satisfied with the succinct yet rich conclusion.

I cannot say enough good things about this book, but I feel many of the other reviewers have covered all the aspects this book has to offer. It is by the far the most enjoyable book I have read all year.