Book Review: “Sky Full of Elephants” by Cebo Campbell
Black Lives Matter
For a while, it has been de rigueur for novelists to imagine a world without men. After all, we’ve had books such as Sandra Newman’s The Men and Christina Sweeney-Baird’s The End of Men. If you’re looking at the world of graphic novels, you have Y: The Last Man, which, as far as I’m aware, was the first of its kind in this genre. The flipside to this equation — a world without women — comes from Stephen and Owen King’s Sleeping Beauties. Now, it’s time for something different: a novel where the white people all vanish in an instant, leaving behind only Blacks and other people of color. World, meet Cebo Campbell’s Sky Full of Elephants. It’s a book about what happens when almost every single white person in the United States suddenly decides to walk into the nearest body of water and drown. As you can see, this novel comes rife with plot holes out of the box: what happens when no lakes, rivers, or oceans are nearby? Why do people suddenly decide death by drowning is the best way to die (note: this becomes less of a plot hole, but the question lingers throughout much of the novel)? And why is it that Natives and people of Asian descent only get token treatment in this new world, even though there must be a sizable amount of them living in America? Yes, Sky Full of Elephants is a novel that you can’t think about too hard, lest your brain get all tangled up in knots.
This novel also isn’t fully resolved and gets caught up in its dangling plot threads. One of them, a promise to find jet fuel and bring it back to someone who procures the protagonists a ride by plane from Chicago to the Deep South, is just explained away in the final pages. This novel additionally has endless monologuing by its characters to reveal their inner thoughts and emotions. You can see I’m leading with all sorts of problems with this book when I should be charitable and kind. However, I think Sky Full of Elephants is the kind of novel that works best if you’re already Black and don’t have the viewpoint of white privilege that I do come to the fore of your reviewing biases. Check that: Black and American. This is a novel about the Black American experience almost exclusively, and to say that it has been a sad experience of 400 years of slavery and segregation, if not worse, would be an understatement. Consider that the Civil Rights era exists in some people’s living memory. That alone makes Sky Full of Elephants important.
I’ve made it to paragraph three without telling you the book’s plot. It concerns a Black man who has been falsely imprisoned for rape for 20 years, who is now living free as soon as the white people up and die. Charles, his name, is teaching solar energy at a university in Washington, D.C. — how he could gain this knowledge to teach when he’s been locked up for about all of his adult life is a mystery — when he gets a phone call from his estranged half-white daughter — the product of the aforementioned “rape” — in Wisconsin. Sidney, her name, wants Charles to take her from her home to a place called Orange Beach in Alabama because she thinks that’s where her white family has gone. The problem is that Alabama has sealed itself off from the rest of the country and is now being ruled by a monarchy, which makes getting to it and getting into it rife with challenges. Charles, for whatever reason, decides to say yes. Before you know it, he is off to Wisconsin in his electric car (which isn’t his) in a world where electricity is spotty at best.
The world presented in Sky Full of Elephants is dystopic, at least in the book’s first half. However, it quickly turns into something else — a philosophical discussion of Blackness in America and what it means to be Black in a world without Caucasians. This is probably what people who have enjoyed this novel have twigged into. The speculative aspect of living in a suddenly free and liberating world is perhaps part of its appeal. Still, there are a lot of plot holes and things that cannot be rationalized away in this book — though I think it’s fair to say that it does try to rationalize the irrational. To give examples, though, might risk giving the big plot twist away. If you were to ask me, Sky Full of Elephants is, in some ways, the Logan’s Run of the 2020s. Both works have major stylistic shifts at their midway points, and dystopias turn into utopias. (If I’m not saying too much there.) In any event, I think it’s best to say that Sky Full of Elephants is not a book that was meant for me. That said, I suppose I learned a fair bit about the Black American experience and gained even more clarity about how Black Americans feel about their Blackness and Americanness. Still, I guess I couldn’t get past the gaps in the plot. That said, if Y: The Last Man proves anything, Sky Full of Elephants may be the first book of its kind, leading to the popularity of books about racial disappearances. If authors can come up with better reasons to erase an entire white patriarchy, then I’m all for it. As it stands now, Sky Full of Elephants has an intriguing premise but a lot of unanswered questions from the reader’s standpoint. Read with an abundance of caution.
Cebo Campbell’s Sky Full of Elephants will be published by Simon & Schuster on September 10, 2024.
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