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Summary
Summary
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION * A spellbinding historical novel set in the eighteenth century: a hero's quest, a love story, the story of a young artist coming of age, and an exuberant heist adventure that traces the bloody legacy of colonialism across two continents and fifty years.
A Best Book of the Year: The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, NPR , Kirkus Reviews
"Addictively absorbing." -- The New York Times Book Review
This wildly inventive, irresistible feat of storytelling from a writer at the height of her powers is "an expertly-plotted, deeply affecting novel about war, displacement, emigration, and an elusive mechanical tiger" (Maggie O'Farrell, best-selling author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait).
Abbas is just seventeen years old when his gifts as a woodcarver come to the attention of Tipu Sultan, and he is drawn into service at the palace in order to build a giant tiger automaton for Tipu's sons, a gift to commemorate their return from British captivity. His fate--and the fate of the wooden tiger he helps create--will mirror the vicissitudes of nations and dynasties ravaged by war across India and Europe.
Working alongside the legendary French clockmaker Lucien du Leze, Abbas hones his craft, learns French, and meets Jehanne, the daughter of a French expatriate. When Du Leze is finally permitted to return home to Rouen, he invites Abbas to come along as his apprentice. But by the time Abbas travels to Europe, Tipu's palace has been looted by British forces, and the tiger automaton has disappeared. To prove himself, Abbas must retrieve the tiger from an estate in the English countryside, where it is displayed in a collection of plundered art.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
James (The Tusk That Did the Damage) returns with a spectacular tale of creativity and colonialism drawing on the "Tippoo's Tiger" automaton displayed in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 1794 Mysore, India, teenager Abbas carves intricate mechanical toys at his father's furniture shop. After Mysore's ruler, Tipu Sultan, learns of Abbas's talents, he orders Abbas to help French inventor and clockmaker Lucien du Leze craft Mysore's first automaton. Their "fantastical curiosity," as Tipu calls the life-size wooden tiger capable of sound and movement, pleases the court. While under du Leze's tutelage, Abbas meets Jehanne Martine, the biracial daughter of Tipu's French armorer. Du Leze, Jehanne, and her father sail to France in 1799, and Abbas stays behind to tend his ailing father. His hopes to follow them are dashed by Britain's bloody conquest of Mysore, and by the time he arrives in Rouen in 1805 to take up the apprenticeship he's been promised, du Leze is dead. He reunites with Jehanne, who tells him the British have shipped the mechanical tiger to England with other looted artifacts. Abbas proposes an audacious plan to reclaim the object, believing its public display could make them rich and give them the chance to make their mark on history. There's an unceasing exuberance to the prose, and James's descriptions are endlessly witty (du Leze's outfit for the tiger's unveiling, an Afghani tunic and a shawl from Kashmir, is "an atlas of textiles"). Rarely is a novel so dense with painful themes also such fun. At once swashbuckling and searing, this is a marvelous achievement. (June)
Guardian Review
Tania James's fiction has straddled continents since the publication of her 2009 debut, Atlas of Unknowns. In Loot, her third full-length novel, she brings this transnational perspective to the story of a real-life artefact and the fictional characters drawn into its gravitational pull. The object in question, known as Tipu's Tiger, is a wooden automaton commissioned in the 1790s by Tipu Sultan, ruler of the Indian kingdom of Mysore. It currently resides in the V&A and depicts a near-life-size tiger mauling the prone body of a European soldier; machinery inside causes the figures to emit a growl when a crank is turned. The circumstances of the tiger's origin are lost to us, but - according to an authorial note - its craftsmanship suggests a melding of Indian and French expertise. From these scant details, James conjures a cast of characters whose relationships span 50 years and half the globe. This is a novel about the pleasures of artifice and the skills required to imitate life The novel begins in the palace of Srirangapatna, where are principal characters are Abbas, a 17-year-old woodcarver's son with a precocious talent, and Lucien Du Leze, a gay, alcoholic French clockmaker unable to return home after the Revolution. Tipu orders them to collaborate on the musical tiger as a gift for his favourite son, but, like every relationship in the novel, this grand gesture of paternal affection is tainted by politics. Though the automaton is a great success, Abbas does not have long to enjoy his new status in the palace. Before he has even finished his apprenticeship with Du Leze, the British besiege the city, the sultan is killed and Abbas - barely escaping the slaughter - is forced to flee the kingdom. Through a series of picaresque adventures he ends up in Rouen, working for Du Leze's adopted daughter, Jehanne, his only desire "to create a thing that would outlast him, and for which he would be remembered". Together they travel to England with a plan to recover the automaton from the widow of Lord Selwyn, the British soldier who looted it after the siege. Despite the obvious wealth of historical research that underpins the book, from woodcarving techniques to the minutiae of life on board sailing ships, James is not aiming for photographic realism here. This is a novel about the pleasures of artifice and the skills required to imitate life; to this end, the author subtly draws attention to the artificial nature of her own creation by dropping occasional contemporary notes into her historical language. There is a reference to Tipu's "origin story"; later, an Indian servant, asked what brought him to England, almost replies, "I am here because you were there" - a quotation attributed to the Sri Lankan writer Ambalavaner Sivanandan, who died in 2018. James makes a virtue of her story's artifice because the historical setting is a lens through which to examine contemporary debates about the legacy of colonialism, particularly as it relates to plundered treasures. The title is made explicit in the name of a card game Jehanne plays with the elderly and canny Lady Selwyn, but throughout the novel, objects and people are appropriated by the powerful, in a world where "race is the final ranking". Loot is a vivid and witty reimagining of an episode of history that continues to shape the present, and the ways we think about art, identity and ownership.
Kirkus Review
An expert Indian woodworker gets a front-row seat to 18th- and 19th-century imperialism. Abbas, the hero of James' lively and symbolically rich third novel, is a poor 17-year-old artisan in Mysore in 1794 when he's recruited by Tipu Sultan, the local ruler, to apprentice with Lucien Du Leze, a French clockmaker. Together they are charged with making an automaton of a tiger attacking a British soldier. The experience hones his carving skills, but just as importantly it introduces him to an intercontinental power play: Tipu, aka the Tiger of Mysore, is attempting to fend off an incursion by the British East India Company by appealing for French support by any means necessary, including the automaton. But with France roiled in the aftermath of its own revolution, Mysore falls in 1799, prompting Abbas to escape to France, where he connects with Lucien's daughter, Jehanne. Together, they plot to recover the automaton, which is in the hands of Lady Selwyn, widow of a British soldier who served in India. From Abbas' first meeting with Lucien to his and Jehanne's negotiations with Selwyn, James trains her descriptions on the ways Indians are displaced and diminished by imperialists and the ways they have to contort themselves to adjust to society. (Selwyn's high-mannered butler, an Indian man named Rum, exemplifies the psychic costs of force-feeding oneself another culture's protocols.) But though the intensity of James' critique is clear, her prose is fleet and rich in ironic humor. "I am here because you were there," Rum thinks, encapsulating the perverse logic and cruelty of his circumstance. The automaton of the novel actually exists, James explains in a note; her novel, as the title hints, is an engaging reminder that today's museum pieces are often functions of forgotten exploitation and theft. A smart, sharp tale, as well crafted as the object at its center. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
James follows The Tusk That Did the Damage (2015) with a rich, sprawling, picaresque historical novel about the apprenticeship of Abbas, an Indian woodworker, to Lucien Du Leze, a dissipated French clockmaker tasked with creating an automaton for India's lateeighteenth-century ruler, Tipu Sultan. The automaton, a Rube Goldberg--like sculpted wooden contraption of cogs, wheels, bellows, and chutes, is encased in an elaborately carved likeness of a tiger eating a man. This gruesome but gorgeous wonder of artistry and engineering brings them a modicum of fame and comfort, but British forces soon topple Tipu's regime and Tipu's tiger vanishes. Du Leze escapes back to France, but Abbas is less fortunate and spends years as an indentured seaman on British warships. Only his dream of being reunited with his mentor, honing his craft, and seeing the enchanting Jehanne, Du Leze's ward, keeps Abbas alive. When Abbas and Jehanne finally reconnect, their shared mission of rescuing and restoring Tipu's tiger launches them on a farcical escapade that sparkles with sharp wit and subtle longing. From the tyrannical opulence of Tipu's palace to the fading glory of a British country manor, James weaves a lustrous tale of intrigue and survival, cunning and romance.