This book, while I realise its a text book, has given me great insight into the latter portion of western culture. This book provides more verifiable references then any other book of this type I've read. Quality color pictures and easily followed footnotes, provides a respectable index and is very easily understood and appreciated.

My own opinion of the book is that sometimes it is quite interesting, but at times also boring.The book is good at describing a realistic story with no happy ending. In it really unfair things happen which makes the reader angry. But you should read it for yourself.

Kathrin Arndt E8/I

It is about a 2 men trying to maintain a coffe bean facility in Africa. Then they fall in love, and half some complications.

Thats basicaly it.

This book is not especially unique and is a melange of several genres but it is contains some interesting vantages, including a great deal that may be based on real life colonial situations in Sri Lanka as the author admits. It is in this respect a rare overview of a vanished colonial past with only remnants today to vindicate former prestige. As someone who has lived in tea estates in Sri Lanka during vacations, I can testify to their beauty and how much more lavish things could have been when their founding masters were on their thrones.

Following hot on the heels of Rebecca released in 1938, the book seems to incorporate several elements in it. The main character in Rebecca is passively swept away by a husband with a fabulous mansion which happens to have a rather haughty and overbearing housekeeper. In Elephant walk the female protagonist actively pursues the rich planter in a manipulative courtship which by far is one of the most interesting phases of the book in the beginning. She enters a strange oversized mansion in Sri Lanka with a degree of profligacy as in Rebecca in the diversity of its overspend having to face a haughty house keeper zealously attached to maintaining tradition. As in Rebecca, the mansion is destroyed at the end.

During colonial times the phenomenon of the bored housewife while the husband went to work was well known and has been fictionally documented by Kipling, Forster (perhaps) and factually in such books as the Fall of the British Empire by C. Cross. This book makes a great play on this phenomenon bringing in an affair with the assistant planter who is tragically separated from the heroin by the Great War.

The interest in the book following the opening courtship lies chiefly in highlighting elements of colonial life that have not really been documented such as how the planters lived, held meetings, their food, drinks, amusements and about the imported coolies from South India. It also describes how such plantations were carved out of pristine wilderness, now hanging on to existence by the skin of its teeth, thanks to such colonial encroachments and their ramifications. Almost all montane elephants in Sri Lanka have since been displaced.

The love story in the book is quite weak and the structure of the plot is not especially sophisticated or well woven. But the author has put in a lot of effort which shows and this book makes a good read.

The book was after all turned into a film with Liz Taylor which probably made it into a best seller at the time and it is probably better than the film.

All in all Elephant Walk is an often sensitive portrayal of heavy memories and facts that one can usually only imagine rather than recreate. It represents the impact and opulence of lifestyles in aspects of Bristish colonialism before the 1950's in Sri Lanka from a contemporary source.

I find this book fairly understandable, easy to follow and a bit of interesting with good pictures!