Sam Jordison 

Not the Booker prize shortlist: a long look at The Last Tiger by Tony Black

Sam Jordison: Our survey of the finalists continues with the story of a young immigrant to Australia who encounters the predatory creatures that were once the country's largest and most efficient killers
  
  

Illustration of two of the now extinct australian carnivorous marsupial mammals The Tasmanian Tigers
Wonderfully strange: the Tasmanian tiger. Photograph: Alamy Photograph: Alamy

The Last Tiger is not about big cats. It's about a curious breed of marsupials from Tasmania called Thylacines. These animals looked more canine than feline, but became known as tigers thanks to their large size, their musky scent and the black stripes running down their hindquarters. The female carried her young in her pouch, while the male hid his vital organs in his to protect them from scrub and brush while out hunting. They were once the largest and most efficient killers on the Australian subcontinent. They were wiped out on the mainland before the British arrived, but survived on Tasmania until the arrival of the white man did for them, too. Their habitat was destroyed, their pelts were hunted for bounty and the last lonely known Thylacine died in Hobart zoo in the 1930s.

It's a sad story – and one with plenty of obvious lessons about our own species' habit of making life untenable for plenty of others. Happily, Tony Black doesn't labour such points, content instead to let his story speak for itself. This narrative concerns Myoko, a 12-year-old refugee from the tzarist occupation of Lithuania, whose father lands a job as a tiger trapper on a Tasmanian sheep station. Myoko, for reasons that seem odd at first, is more sentimental than most of the locals. He even gets upset when lambs have their tails docked: "As he worked Nathaniel kept up a chatter about his task, but I listened more to the lamb's cries. I felt the animal's pain inside me, but it did not reach me like a board's nail through my foot, it was a heartscald, a deep anguish."

He feels the death of each tiger even more deeply and does what he can to protect them, believing that one in particular looks to him for salvation: "But as I looked upon my tiger and his mate, I understood they now had nowhere left to run. Were their cubs to survive they would need more than my tiger's protection. I wanted to believe he had come to me for help."

It's a strange emotional register for a child living on the verge of subsistence in a tough community in 1909, but Black does enough to make it seem comprehensible, if not entirely convincing. Likewise, that ponderous English, with its quasi-biblical rhythms and plangent vocabulary, never quite settles – but it does make an odd sort of sense for the voice of this curious narrator. It also enables Black to blast off some pleasingly unexpected metaphors: "I cared deeply for my mother but I now feared the cast of her mind had grown as fragile as frost upon a meadow," Myoko tells us at one point. Better still, he says that his "actions with the Winchester rifle had sent poisonous fishes swimming underneath my skin".

Sadly, he isn't always so original, and is also capable of disappointing cliche: "I felt like my world was turning inside out"; "he felt as lifeless as a doll … seeing him like this felt like a sharp blade plunged in my heart."

The storytelling is similarly hit and miss. There are moments when the gears grind, particularly as Black rolls out a dual narrative explaining why Myoko's family had to leave Lithuania and how they ended up in Tasmania. Yet while the changeover frequently chugs, there are also moments of fine drama and pathos. When Black hits the sweet spot, the secondary story feeds beautifully into the first. Many of the uncertainties I felt about the book at the beginning had satisfying answers. Myoko's complicated relationship with his father and his trade took on tragic resonance, as did the sad fate of the Tasmanian tigers.

I could have done without quite so much anthropomorphism and anguish, but when Black plays it straight and shows the fate of these doomed creatures in plain terms, he hits home: "I saw the young female tiger leave the cover of her cubs to pace the cage for a few brief moments. She looked in a daze as she crept towards the four walls, each after the other, as if in disbelief of the limits of her surroundings."

These descriptions carry all the more weight because Black does such an excellent job of showing the tigers in the wild and making them seem real, important and wonderfully strange. If nothing else, this book will make you wonder at their fate – and feel its sadness. It's a pretty impressive recreation of an animal we know very little about. And on those terms at least, it should be counted a success.

• Next week: First Time Solo by Iain Maloney.

 

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