Dark doings in the Amazon

State of Wonder
By Ann Patchett
Published by HarperCollins
Available at Asia Books
Reviewed by James Eckardt
 

Ann Patchett’s seventh novel, “State of Wonder” made a big splash upon publication, with many critics comparing it to Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. This is nonsense. Comparing Kurtz, the cruel conqueror of an African tribe in the heart of the Congo, to Dr Annick Swenson, an elderly, eccentric and cleverly mendacious medical researcher in the Brazilian Amazon, is a massive stretch. And she’s not far from civilisation - only a few hours boatride from the capital, Manaus.
Still, it is a gripping read. Patchett is a master of the novelist’s craft and she lays out an intricate and convincing plot. She holds off introducing Dr Annick Swenson, surrounded by mystery and controversy, until the novel is one third underway.
Rather, the focus of the book – the Charles Marlow character– is Dr Marina Singh, a research biologist at a Minnesota pharmaceutical firm. Swenson has been in the jungle for decades, on the track on an Indian natural remedy that prolongs fertility into the fifties and sixties. Her colleague, Anders Eckman, has been sent to bring Dr Swenson and her research notes back home, but his prey has written a cold and concise letter reporting that Eckman has died of a jungle fever. Singh is selected to go in his place.
In Manaus, Singh is artfully put in her place by an array of characters dedicated to protecting Swenson’s isolation.
Then, accompanied by a deaf-mute Indian boy named Easter, Swenson makes a dramatic appearance at the opening of Glock’s “Orfeo ed Surdice” at the Teatro Amazonas, the legendary opera house that rose upon the Amazon’s rubber boom at the turn of the 20th century.
Swenson’s arrival is worth the wait. She is curt, imperious, majestic, eloquent – and a prodigious liar. As a surgical professor in Johns Hopkins, she had terrified Marina Singh. She does so again, over the course of weeks at her camp in the riverside village of the Lakashi tribe, as she deftly manipulates Singha and drops veil upon veil of deceptions.
Swenson’s aim is to convince Singh to stay and take over her mission which she, in turn, had inherited by her own mentor and lover, the swashbuckling Martin Rapp.
There are plots within plots within plots, the momentum quickened by a looming presence of the cannibalistic Hummocca tribe.
Singh yearns to be released from this dark world and return to the old placid life n Minnesota.
“Trust me, you won’t fit in there anymore,” Swenson tells her. “You’ve changed. You’ve betrayed your employer, and you’ll keep on betraying him, and that won’t sit well with someone like you. I changed myself once, it was a long time ago but I changed. I followed my teacher down here too.”
The final lurch of the plot is startling as the reader is transported in the space of two pages from the depths of the jungle to normal, sunny, suburban Minnesota. But the many moral questions raised in this deeply serious novel remain unanswered.