Elephants and Radium Girls

 

In The Only Harmless Great Thing, Brooke Bolander has taken on two strange and disturbing events from the early 20^th century: the willfully negligent poisoning of young women painting radium-tinged watch dials for the United States Radium Company, and the public electrocution of Topsy the elephant at Coney Island in 1903. Bolander somehow burrowed into each story to find their shared DNA, and then performed some recombinant alchemy to merge them into one harrowing and resonant story, with a tragic and poetically just ending. 

In its under 100 pages, the book brilliantly illuminates the dark side of our attraction to the shining, sparking effects brought by electricity and radioactivity. On top of that, it gives us fresh ways to think about how the DNA of our shared stories spirals through time and culture.

The book’s central story pairs Regan, a fictionalized Radium Girl, with the elephant Topsy, in a fragile cross-species friendship. In Bolander’s topsy-turvy alternate timeline, Topsy is one of a number of elephants bought and trained by the company to paint watch dials after the Radium Girls’ health issues have come to light. In one of the book’s sublime inventions, the elephants have learned to communicate through an ASL-like sign language using their trunks, so Regan and Topsy are able to converse. (I wish that development could be imported to our timeline.)

Regan’s ripe Appalachian twang brings the aspect of class into focus—she is a low-class rural outsider in the urban factory, able to get the elephants’ exploitation immediately. The slightly archaic idioms she uses make a strong vessel for her outrage as the story races forward.

Two other stories frame this one, and they carry meta-questions about how stories are made, how they take root, are preserved, and shape us. In the first one, happening in a slightly skewed near-present time, Topsy’s execution has made an indelible impression on the American psyche, and cemented a pop-culture association between elephants and radioactivity—to the point that a Dumbo-like Topsy has starred in a beloved Disney movie. In this story, a young researcher urges the elephants to agree to have their genomes altered so their skin will glow when it’s near radioactive waste—a signal of danger to humans in the far future.

The second story-layer gives full, mythic voice to the elephants. An elephant-mother recounts the legend of the revered long-ago ancestor who dove into a tar pit to retrieve the lost stories of her people. The storyteller, we realize, lives in that future time when she and her kind have agreed to be that glowing warning system for humanity. Their vast chain of memory, stretching eons backward and forward in time, shows humanity’s self-narrative to be pretty puny by comparison.

For me, coming in with a long obsession with Nikola Tesla, Bolander’s Radium Girls-Topsy remix hits a nerve. The electrocution of the real Topsy has been associated with Thomas Edison, mainly because Edison was known to have arranged public electrocutions of smaller animals during the Current Wars of the early 1890s. (These spectacles aimed to show how dangerous Tesla’s AC current was; but Tesla’s AC won the current wars, being superior in numerous ways to Edison’s DC.) Edison most likely didn’t have a hand in Topsy’s death, but the electric-powered public spectacle at Coney Island was surely inspired by his venal stunts.

Tesla, on the other hand, brought an almost utopian idealism to his electronic innovations. He even pioneered the medical use of electricity, believing that immersion in  electromagnetic fields was good for human health. (We’ve learned to be more careful about the effects of such constant bombardment.) Tesla’s idealism took part in his era’s belief that nature existed as a resource for humanity, in service of the progress of civilization. In Bolander’s vision, both Edison and Tesla are caught, found complicit in a system that blithely digs up radium and conscripts the weakest members of society to handle it.

Yet the elephants’ understanding takes us beyond this stew of human, animal, and natural exploitation. Topsy recognizes electricity as a mutated form of lightning, and the far-future elephant mother shares that understanding. Even living with the poisonous aftereffects of the nuclear industry, she and her tribe persist, citizens of the natural world, protected  by their collective, long-lasting, storied understanding.