Julia Whitty’s A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga demonstrates clearly the difficulty of pigeonholing environmental fiction, offering us a set of short stories with both urban and natural settings, human and non-human characters. Whitty’s work clearly fits eco-critic Suzanne Ross’ paradigm of eco-fiction: “the literature we cherish speaks of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all life and seeks to reveal the embeddedness of human life in the life of the world.”

This set of ten tales is bookended by the opening title story of a giant tortoise stranded for almost 200 years in a human world, and by the closing story “The Dreams of Dogs” in which a city woman and her dog - aptly named Grace and Salvator - learn to become a part of the natural one. The woman learns via the teachings of a Pomo Indian visitor and an encounter with a bear (reminiscent of Old Ben in Faulkner’s “The Bear”) and the dog by taking local coyotes as her mates. The protagonists in the eight stories in between range from animals in a marine park dreaming of rebellion against their captors and an art student mesmerized by the color- and light-scapes of sky and water in Venice, to a guilt-ridden tracker in an African game park and an up-tight, insecure Darwin learning humility and happiness from the bats in a Galapagos-like Heaven.

Each of the stories in this slim volume blurs the boundaries between past and present, between unlike species and unlike people, between knowledge, memory and imagination. Whitty does indeed deal with “the deafness of the human heart,” but she also writes about the flow of generations, species memory, and connections to a greater whole.

Whitty’s style is straightforward, easy to read and thoroughly believable, despite her reliance on extended metaphors, an often dreamlike tone, and the sometimes inexplicable. One such story is “Jimmy Under Water,” in which a professional diver removes his mask at the end of each dive in an attempt to re-enact and understand his 38 minutes of out-of–body experience at the bottom of a frozen Minnesota lake 19 years previously. Whitty’s words have the ability to evoke the sight, smell and feel not only of the icy lake water, but also those of the animals on the African veldt, of the dank mustiness of a Cro-Magnon cave in France, of the tropical heat and foliage of a South Seas island, and of the redwood forests of Northern California’s Sierras.

In addition to dealing with the natural world - with or without human impact – Whitty’s writings touch on issues of race, class, culture, and gender - in other words - identity in all of its complexity and ambiguity. Whether read solely for personal pleasure or assigned to students in an eco-lit or eco-comp class, A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga has lessons for all of us about humankind’s place in the life of the world.

Jeri Pollock teaches eco-comp and eco-lit at Moorpark College in Southern California