John Varley returns from the icy depths with Mammoth

At first glance Mammoth appears to be the sort of novel that you can parse from the cover alone from which a mammoth looks back at you. You might speculate that it's a thriller about a mammoth running wild and attacking people. The prehistoric craze which shot up thanks to Jurrasic Park has never quite carried mammoths along but people generally have a fondness for elephants and Mammoths are essentially elephants with fur, boosting the cuteness factor. Reading the blurb for Mammoth doesn't help either. It makes Mammoth sound like a conventional story of time travel. All that might be so until you look at the name of the author. John Varley.

John Varley is many things but what he is not known for is writing conventional stories. Mammoth is no Steel Beach. In fact broken down to its basics, Mammoth has an entirely conventional plot. A powerful billionaire seeks to clone a mammoth when his dig stumbles on a man wearing a wristwatch and carrying a time machine frozen in the ice. The result narrative tells the story of his pursuit of time travel and mammoths. But that of course no more describes Mammoth than you can describe Being John Malkovich as a story about possessing other people's bodies. It is technically accurate but it entirely fails to give you the picture of what it is really about.

John Varley's work has never been easily summed up and while Mammoth is not one of his best novels, it is a very entertaining read. This is not John Varley the philosopher, this is John Varley the entertainer and Mammoth is a circus of a novel, sometimes loosely plotted, sloppily told and written with a complete disinterest for the conventions of writing and Science Fiction. It has the air of a story told while reclining in an easy chair and spilling a tall tale accompanied by more than a few glasses of booze. But it is not a phoned in effort, more an improvisation, that brilliant set of impromptu guitar riffs that suddenly sound like gold played in the park.

If Mammoth is about anything, it isn't about Mammoths but about what it takes to make us happy. There are in practice only three characters in Mammoth who matter. Howard Christian, a brilliant billionaire with an empty life and a drive to collect and amass. Professor Matthew Wright, a former child prodigy, expert on the physics of time travel and a lonely socially isolated man who sometimes finds himself unable to even speak to others. And Dr. Susan Morgan, a scion of the circus who has been hired to impregnate ordinary African elephants with sperm taken from an excavated mammoth frozen in ice, with whom Professor Matthew Wright falls in love with. But of course there's also a fourth character, Fuzzy. Fuzzy isn't a bear, he's a hybrid Mammoth, brought along with his herd into the present when Matthew and Susan find themselves stranded in time after an animal rights attack on Howard Christian's facility goes wrong.

It is Howard Christian who dominates much of the novel, despite John Varley's sloppy characterization of him, from a supposed brilliant inventor to a man who routinely needs basic scientific principles explained to him for the purposes of exposition. Yet the man himself, child of an impoverished family, hardscrabble businessman, greedy to a fault, a petty thief, genius and utterly ruthless manchild who dreams of being a superhero, who dominates the novel and serves ultimately as its raison d’être.

The time machine found beneath the ice is like nothing on earth and Howard Christian wants it, because Howard Christian is the sort of man who collects fifty thousand dollar collectible toys and steals them when he can't have them. He's the sort of man who covers up everything and who maintains a giant tower in the middle of Los Angeles with a powerful microlaser built inside in order to fight evil. Unfortunately the evil sometimes turns out to be Howard Christian himself.

When Matthew Wright and Susan Morgan reappear in the middle of Los Angeles with a herd of angry mammoths who were busy being chased around by spear wielding humans trying to drive them in the original LaBrea tar pits, the resulting laser and LAPD fueled slaughter leads to Matthew Wright going on the run while Dr. Susan Morgan takes the youngest of the mammoths, Little Fuzzy over into Howard Christian's care, who promptly creates the Cretaceous Park or Fuzzyland built all around him. And when Matthew Wright returns five years later with the knowledge of time travel, Susan Morgan has something she wants him to help her with first. She wants him to help her steal Fuzzy.

One of the most entertaining things about Mammoth is its sheer unpredictability. Just when you feel like you can assume where the next chapter will take you based on decades knowledge of Sci Fi genre cliches, John Varley throws you out a curveball and you find yourself scrambling to keep up and figure out what happens next. From a distance the balls seem to fly smoothly, one plotline fitting into another but reading them up close, they fly wild and wooly as the mammoths themselves.

As Matthew Wright struggles to understand the secret of a time machine that appears to be powered by nothing more than ordinary batteries and consists of thousands of spheres made from every element in the periodic table, it becomes increasingly clear that this will not be a conventional time travel story. There is no DeLorean that goes eighty eight miles an hour. There is no H.G. Wellesian contraption of gears and Victorian keyboards. There is only the naked human soul. And of course there is always the human desire to seize the forbidden fruit, to become what we are not or at least to find our place in the world. By the end of Mammoth, every character, from Howard Christian to Susan Morgan to Matthew Wright and even Fuzzy have found their place in the world, at great cost. But yet in the end they are happy. Some might call the ending of Mammoth a copout, an author rescuing two characters he likes from oblivion while banishing a character he dislikes to purgatory. Or you might just call in John Varley's last fastball.