The Elephant and the Kangaroo
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Mrs. O’Callaghan had come up with some pretty farfetched notions, but when she came running to Mr. White with this announcement, he was convinced she’d lost all touch with reality. Yet when the sensible English writer—whose only mistake had been to set up his workshop on the O’Callaghan’s rundown Irish farm—ventured into the kitchen to see what had so upset his landlady, he was shocked to discover that the Archangel Michael had come down the chimney and was hovering there, waiting to pass on a message of deep significance: There was going to be a Flood, and it was up to the O’Callaghans and Mr. White to build an Ark just the way Noah had. Well, maybe not exactly the way Noah had. After all, Mr. White didn’t have the same kind of help to work with. Still, he’d find a way to manage, and a way to start the world again too—even though he’d always been a confirmed bachelor. He’d do it all—as long as he didn’t have to save the elephants and the kangaroos!
From T. H. White, best-selling author of The Sword and the Stone, The Once and Future King, and The Book of Beasts, comes this long unavailable satirical fantasy of twentieth-century Ireland. First published in 1947, The Elephant and the Kangaroo is something of a modern-day Gulliver’s Travels, exploring an English writer’s journey through a land at once familiar and alien, as he answers an Almighty challenge to save a world which he’s not sure is really worth preserving. And it doesn’t take him long to find out that building an ark just isn’t as easy as it used to be....
“A STINGING COMMENTARY...A MAD FLIGHT OF FANCY.”—Kirkus
“HILARIOUSLY FUNNY.”—Library Journal
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Terence Hanbury “Tim” White (29 May 1906 - 17 January 1964) was an English author best known for his sequence of Arthurian novels, The Once and Future King, first published together in 1958. One of his most memorable stories is the first of that series, The Sword in the Stone, published as a stand-alone book in 1938.
Born in Bombay in British India to English parents, he attended Cheltenham College in Gloucestershire, a public school, and Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he was tutored by the scholar and occasional author L. J. Potts. Potts became a lifelong friend and correspondent, and White later referred to him as “the great literary influence in my life.” While at Queens’ College, White wrote a thesis on Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, and graduated in 1928 with a first-class degree in English.
White then taught at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire until 1936, when he went to live in a workman’s cottage nearby. In 1939 he moved to Doolistown in County Meath, Ireland, where he lived out the Second World War as a de facto conscientious objector. In 1946, White settled in Alderney, the third largest of the Channel Islands, where he lived for the rest of his life.
He died of heart failure on 17 January 1964 aboard ship in Piraeus (Athens, Greece), en route to Alderney from a lecture tour in the United States. He is buried in First Cemetery of Athens.
