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Mammoth by Chris Flynn

by
May 2020, no. 421

Mammoth by Chris Flynn

University of Queensland Press, $29.99 pb, 264 pp

Mammoth by Chris Flynn

by
May 2020, no. 421

Everything about Chris Flynn’s Mammoth – the characters, plot, and structure – should not work. But it does, and beautifully so. Mammoth is narrated by the fossilised remains of a 13,354-year-old extinct American Mammoth (Mammut americanum), who likes to be addressed as Mammut. On 24 March 2007, the eve of his sale at the Natural History Auction in New York, Mammut finds himself in a room with Tyrannosaurus bataar (who prefers to be called T.bat).

Time, especially deep time, is a major preoccupation in the novel. Mammut is an infant from the point of view of T.bat (who lived around seventy million years ago), but because Mammut walked the Earth with ancient humans and has lived as a fossil among humans for more than two hundred years (T.bat was only unearthed in 1991), he has experience other fossils do not. To pass the time on the night before the auction, Mammut tells the tale of his life, his death, and his reawakening as a fossil travelling the world at the whims of Homo sapiens (whom all characters refer to as hominids).

Astrid Edwards reviews 'Mammoth' by Chris Flynn

Mammoth

by Chris Flynn

University of Queensland Press, $29.99 pb, 264 pp

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Comment (1)

  • So, as an adult and one who has worked in energy and climate change for decades, I don't understand what I was meant to get from this book, if anything? I persevered and finished it but must say it was nowhere near my top reads. Yet it still begs the question - what was the purpose of the story? I'd truly like to know.
    Posted by Irene Wyld
    21 July 2020