History and travelogue combine wonderfully in this tale of colonial plunder and hubris .... Luminous ... Reflective, watchful, calm, Roberts is such a vivid travel writer that you forget what a brilliant historian she is. She has the water-diviner’s gift for stories in unlikely places. And then, through research in archives as well as on the ground, for uncovering sparky details that bring the story to life ... Her narrative [has] a glow of sympathetic charm ... It is Robert’s thoughtful reactions to these events in places where they happened, sometimes under the very same trees, that give her book its power ... [An] ugly story is made bearable by her warm, beautiful writing, and equally warm human encounters.
[Roberts] has an eye for the encounter but struggles to connect the parallel worlds of her narrative (past and present, Europe and Africa) ... Ms. Roberts’s pachydermal pursuit is a wild-goose chase with elements of the shaggy-dog story. She never shows why the quartet of elephants might reveal how 'European imperialism had unfolded on the African continent' ... There are also more howlers here than in the forest at twilight.
Roberts...writes eloquently about the landscape at times, and A Training School for Elephants is an accessible primer on African colonial history and Leopold’s depredations ... Her contemporary journey through Tanzania is more troubling ... Roberts errs by looking for the past in the present and failing to fully engage with that present on its own terms ... Roberts has intriguing encounters—she’s good about arranging meetings with various tribal chiefs, for instance, but she gets a pithy quote or two and then she’s gone. What does it mean to be a chief in modern Tanzania? How does private and political life ebb and flow in this country 60-some years after independence? She doesn’t say, never staying long enough in any one community to learn what life really looks like for its people today.
A story of folly and hubris ... The risk, therefore, is of a somewhat dutiful book, suitable for our times. Fortunately, her writing has a more enduring quality, and her journey along Carter’s route is illuminated by sensitive portrayals of the people she meets, her fine ear for dialogue and, perhaps especially, her poignant observations about a denuded environment ... No doubt, but A Training School for Elephants works precisely because it is so evocative, and because many of the characters within are more complex—in all their greed and prejudice, but also courage and misguided idealism—than might be fashionable to admit in our censorious times.
In spite of Roberts’ interrogation of colonialism, her thoughtful approach to geographic and ethnic group naming, and her critical account of Carter’s journey and Leopold’s motivation, there is something uncomfortable in centering so much of the book around her own experiences as a British woman traveling in Africa in search of answers. Roberts misses the irony of positioning herself as the main character in this effort to remedy historical erasure ... A little-known episode of colonial African history paired with a conceptually problematic personal account.
