Alexander Páez reviews The Only Harmless Great Thing, by Brooke Bolander

I am greatly honored to host this review of The Only Harmless Great Thing by my friend Alexander Páez, a huge fan of Brooke Bolander's work (and, in fact, the translator into Spanish of one of her stories). Hope you enjoy it, and remember that you can also read the review in Spanish at Álex's blog, Donde acaba el infinito.  

Review Soundtrack: I suggest reading this review while listening to Radium Girls, by Pat Burtis (Spotify).

I’m going to make this short, as the story here is short as well. A quick punch to the guts. A brief “Holy cow” swearing. A short realization that you’ve read a huge and profound story. An angry story. An “I’m tired of this shit” story. If you have read "Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies" you may know what I am talking about. I will call it Rage Writing. Stories that comes as a ferocity burst of being tired of this society that allows inequality, injustice and suffering. 

The Only Harmless Great Thing is a story hard to talk about. I read it in two days and I felt like I was in a hurry. I needed to finish it as soon as possible. Get rid of that anger. Get rid of than painful story. This novella is a mix of two real stories: Topsy the Elephant and the Radium Girls. The first one is about an elephant that was publicly executed on Coney Island and the Radium Girls is a group of women who ended poisoned because of their work with radioactive stuff. Although the events happened in different timelines (1903 and 1917) Bolander builds her fiction among these two events occurring at the same time. In Bolander’s novella we have the electrocution of an elephant that causes a nuclear explosion at the coast of New York. The story goes back and forward between many protagonists and characters, before and after the Topsy execution and the aftermath explosion. Bolander introduces songs, lullabies, a fable about an ancient elephant mother, and media pieces. All of it makes a collage of small stories, tiny points of view that the reader must put together to understand what is going on. Just imaging that someone throws a lot of documents on your table and you have to reconstruct the whole story. It is fun. It is exhausting. It is challenging. It is Bolander.

The transitions in the story are smooth and perfect, you don’t feel like as a reader you are being pushed around in a fuzzy way, but that you are being on your own in a huge gallery and you kind of choose what piece you approach. The book is very short, yes, but is has so much to say. It actually says so much. Funny how many things we have to say about such tiny pieces and so less about the incredible long ones. The Only Harmless Great Thing is a fable about nuclear waste, slavery, fighting women, animal abuse, patriarchy and many more metaphors you will find. To end this, I will speak about the beginning of the book, which opens with a huge mountain of nuclear waste, the total extinction of humanity. And over there are living the irradiated elephants. Eternal. Brooke Bolander’s writing is like a roar, a vast battle cry. And we can’t ignore it.