What a story about giraffes reveals about communism

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GIRAFFE: A NOVEL

By J.M. Legard

Penguin Press, $24.95, 304 pages

REVIEWED BY GARY ANDERSON

If Simon and Garfunkel are correct, zebras are the reactionaries of the animal world; why then, did the commies kill the giraffes? J.M. Legard answers this question in his surrealistic first novel "Giraffe." The novel centers on an actual event, the 1975 slaughter of the largest giraffe herd in captivity in the world in a Czechoslovakian zoo.

The story of why the communist government of the former Czechoslovakia would do such a thing is interesting in itself, but the book is really how normal people survived in the mind-numbing bosom of communist totalitarianism.

Red Czechoslovakia was reasonably benign as compared to Stalinist Russia, North Korea or Romania; however, it came replete with the demand for conformity and repetition of a communist state where innovation was viewed with suspicion. As one character observes, the end of the communist state will not lay in its evil nature, but in its lack of imagination.

The characters in the book cope by sleepwalking, some literally and some figuratively. Perhaps the characters, who manage to adjust the best to communist rule, are the captive giraffes who never truly sleep. At night they wander about in a state of near sleep but their eyes are always open to danger around them. Conformity however, profits them little. In the end, they are declared to be "enemies of the state" and liquidated. I'll leave the reader to discover how that comes about.

Amina, the female human protagonist, is a real sleepwalker, and her affliction leads her into several perilous situations. This may be as a result of an unconscious death wish. Amina is aware that she is slowly being poisoned by the noxious fumes from the Christmas decoration factory in which she is employed.