Paperback reviews: Beneath the Heart of the Sea, Malice, White Beech, The Rise of Islamic State, The Poetry of Sex

Owen Chase was first mate on the Essex, a Nantucket whaling ship that was sunk by an enraged sperm whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in 1820. Cast adrift in tiny lifeboats, Chase and his fellow survivors considered their options. To the west lay the Marquesas Islands, which they feared were inhabited by cannibal tribes; to the east, much farther away, the coast of Chile. The sailors chose the latter, but headwinds blew them off course and they spent months at sea with little food or water. In a tragic irony, they were forced to resort to cannibalism themselves before they were rescued by a passing American vessel.

Chase wrote about his harrowing experiences in this memoir, first published in 1821. It has been reissued to tie in with Ron Howard’s film version, out later this year; both the book and the movie are being marketed as “the true story that inspired Moby-Dick”. Chase was, in fact, only one among many sources for Herman Melville’s great novel (although, to be fair, a big-screen adaptation of, say, Thomas Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale would probably have struggled to get the Hollywood green light).

Melville charitably called Chase’s book a “plain and faithful narrative,” but it’s rather awkwardly written; you can find more dramatic renditions of the Essex story in Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael (1947) and Nathaniel Philbrick’s National Book Award-winning In the Heart of the Sea (2000) – the latter draws on other survivors’ accounts and forms the basis of Howard’s film. Nevertheless, Chase’s original is worth reading for the small, poignant details that reveal the depths of the hunger that led him to transgress that terrible taboo: when flying fish land in the bottom of Chase’s boat, the sailors gobble them down raw, “scales, wings and all”.

***

Malice by Keigo Higashino (trs by Alexander o Smith) (Abacus £8.99)

It may seem strange from the country that gave us Hello Kitty, but cats often get a raw deal in Japanese literature. In the work of Yukio Mishima and Haruki Murakami, moggie-murder is a recurring trope – it’s often used as shorthand to suggest a character’s criminal psychosis.

Cat-killing is also a major plot device in this superb mystery-thriller from the Japanese novelist Keigo Higashino. The book centres on the murder of a famous writer, Hidaka– a crime that may or may not have something to do with his tendency to poison the neighbourhood kittens. The chief suspect is another writer, Nonoguchi, whose unreliable testimony forms the bulk of the narrative; we also hear from Kaga, the workaholic detective assigned to the case.

To reveal any more would be to risk spoiling this novel’s revelatory pleasures. Suffice it to say that the story has more twists and turns than the Tokyo metro – and proves that Higashino is a master of the form.

****

White Beech by Germaine Greer (Bloomsbury £9.99)

In 2001, Germaine Greer bought a run-down dairy farm in Queensland. This memoir tells the story of how she teamed up with her botanist sister to turn the land into a forest reserve, a haven for birds and beasts and rare white beech trees. Greer’s writing about nature is truly wonderful: a bird’s “fanned brick-red tail is edged with a white so bright it seems to leave tracks in the sunlit air”; “emus loped beside me … my ears tuned to the electric sizzle of the finches’ song”. Indeed, to fulfil her stated goal of “conveying the deep joy that rebuilding wild nature can bring” Greer might have given freer rein to this poetic impulse, and submitted the more academic parts of the book to a bit of pruning.

****

The Rise of Islamic State by Patrick Cockburn (Verso £9.99)

Veteran Independent on Sunday journalist Patrick Cockburn is one of our foremost experts on the Middle East, and this book, which addresses the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis), is essential reading. Cockburn describes how the militant jihadi group has taken advantage of the weakness of the Iraqi government and the Syrian civil war to win a huge swathe of territory. Cockburn examines and analyses very recent Isis assaults and also takes a step back to explore how these events reflect wider trends, including the conflict between Sunni and Shi’a, and the resurgent Cold War between the US and Russia. Cockburn’s conclusion is chastening: “A new and terrifying state has been born that will not easily disappear.”

*****

The Poetry of Sex, edited by Sophie Hannah (Penguin £9.99)

Whether you’re loved up after Valentine’s Day, or sick of the whole shebang, this collection of poetry about sex will have something for you. Sophie Hannah’s excellent selection ranges over centuries, from Ovid to Carol Ann Duffy. The tone moves from the ecstatically sensual (Michelle McGrane’s “If You Are Lucky”: “the hot-breathed arrival of desire/the frenzied coupling/as you opened soundlessly/and the world flooded into you”) to the playful (E E Cummings’s “May I Feel”: “may i touch said he/how much said she/ a lot said he/why not said she”). You also get no fewer than two lust-drenched poems about the James Bond actor Daniel Craig for your money, if he’s your thing.

****

View the original article here

North Korea: State of Paranoia review

Kim Jong-un receives applause during a military drill. Photograph: Kcna/Reuters

Mention North Korea and people usually expect tales of horror or ridicule. There is good reason for both. A UN commission of inquiry came out in February with a report on the "unspeakable atrocities" committed in the country. "The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world," the commission said. "These crimes against humanity entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation." It quoted former labour camp inmates who said prisoners would catch snakes and mice to feed malnourished babies.

On the ridicule front came a recent news item (from a US-funded anti-Pyongyang radio station) about Kim Jong-un, the country's 31-year-old leader who represents the third generation of the dynasty that has run North Korea since the second world war. The word was that he had ordered all male students to wear their hair like his, shaved bare at back and sides but thick and unparted on top. The fact that the flimsily sourced story was never confirmed officially, and visitors to Pyongyang campuses saw no evidence to support it, did not prevent it from being widely published around the world. Anything, however disgusting or outlandish, looks credible in what the media often call the "hermit kingdom".

It is refreshing then to find an author who is willing to approach the country soberly, analysing its tumultuous history, regional context and difficult relations with its allies. Living and working in Shanghai, Paul French has studied and written about North Korea for many years. He pulls no punches on the country's ruthless politics or the grim lives its people are forced to endure. There are titbits here that seem to reinforce the more ridiculous stories. Smoking while driving is banned, though for safety rather than health reasons: smoking would prevent drivers from smelling that something is wrong with their car.

But French is primarily concerned with North Korea's economy. This, he argues, is central to understanding the policy shifts and the leadership's motives over the last 60 years. The country is not the world's last communist state, but it is the only one that has never seriously experimented with private entrepreneurship, let alone oligarchs and crony capitalism. The army leadership lives well, with privileged access to food supplies and scarce consumer goods, but there is no "deep state" that permits the military to run large economic enterprises as in Cuba or various non-communist states such as Turkey and Egypt. North Korea has a command economy par excellence, and in French's account the ruling elite has virtually given up on fundamentally changing it, even though it occasionally talks of reform.

Efforts to attract foreign investment have largely failed. Plans for special economic zones where foreign companies can operate as capitalists with a tame labour force did not succeed because North Korea could not supply the necessary infrastructure or energy. The country lives off foreign aid, given out of genuine altruism by UN agencies and foreign NGOs as famine relief or extracted from foreign governments as payback for minor political concessions. The historic visit that South Korea's president Kim Dae-jung made to Pyongyang in 2000 was agreed only after the government in Seoul paid $500m.

Even the nuclear brinkmanship in which North Korea regularly indulges by threatening to launch missiles or conduct new underground tests has no real military content. Pyongyang has no intention of invading South Korea, nor would China allow it to if it ever became serious. The bluster is mainly designed to restart international negotiations in the hope of new economic payments or concessions, while also keeping up the drumbeat of domestic propaganda that warns North Koreans the country is under permanent threat and needs to maintain high spending on defence.

Many countries try to solve their economic difficulties by printing extra money; North Korea does it with unusual creativity. It does not bother to churn out more of its own currency, the won. It prints very accurate $100 bills and buys goods abroad with them. These sophisticated counterfeits net the country an estimated $25m a year.

Until the mid-1970s, North Korea was wealthier than South Korea in terms of GDP per head. Bringing more people into the industrial workforce and investing state funds allowed the country to recover relatively quickly after the destruction of the three-year Korean war. But the command economy could not work effectively once more sophisticated production was needed. Collectivised agriculture floundered in the absence of sufficient fertiliser and fuel for farm machinery. In the words of one analyst, the country went "from riches to rags".

Like other command economies, North Korea allows peasants to produce some food and keep poultry in their gardens for sale at local markets, but this is not enough to feed urban populations. Poor transport links, bad roads and a shortage of vehicles mean that tonnes of food produced on state farms rots before it reaches the cities. Annual famines were a regular feature in the 1990s.The regime put them down to natural causes such as crop failures, drought and flooding, but outside experts blamed government policies for part of the problem. The UN's World Food Programme and Food and Agriculture Organisation estimated that the food deficit was roughly 50 per cent of national requirements at the end of the 1990s, a shortfall greater than that seen in the Ethiopian famine of 1985.

French points out that North Korea's leadership is nobody's puppet. During the Sino-Soviet split following Stalin's death, Kim Il-sung, the country's long-serving leader, first tried to keep in with both sides but then broke both with Khrushchev's revisionism and Mao's Cultural Revolution. Mao's Little Red Book was blocked from circulation.

Forty years later, China still protects North Korea diplomatically from outside pressure, but there is no ideological affinity between Pyongyang's command economy and China's increasingly capitalist one. Russian relations with Pyongyang cooled severely when Soviet communism collapsed and Boris Yeltsin cut cheap fuel supplies and other subsidies, dealing a sudden and massive blow to the North Korean economy.French provides a comprehensive account of the controversies surrounding North Korea's nuclear programme. A period of genuine promise emerged in 1994 when the US and North Korea reached an Agreed Framework thanks to the diplomacy of former President Jimmy Carter whom Bill Clinton had appointed as a special envoy. Kim Il-sung was to halt his nuclear programme in return for US support in providing "proliferation-resistant" light-water reactors to develop the country's civilian energy production. It was a good compromise but South Korea and Japan were to shoulder most of the cost and these two countries started to raise objections. When George W Bush came to power and cited North Korea in his "axis of evil" speech in 2002, the deal fizzled. In spite of sporadic negotiations between Pyongyang and Washington to find a new agreement, with China, Japan, Russia and South Korea also involved at the table, there has been no breakthrough for the last dozen years. None is expected.

North Korea is not so much a failed state as a frozen one. How will it ever melt? When the Berlin Wall fell, some US hawks advocated a crazy policy of encouraging North Koreans to walk across the border to China en masse. (The border with South Korea is covered in mines.) But, unlike in divided Berlin, not many Koreans live near the border. Others took the German experience of unification as a warning more than a model. If there ever was to be a reconciliation between the two Koreas – a goal both countries claim to desire – it should be more gradual than that between the two German states, which involved too sharp a collapse in employment and welfare services in the east and a heavy reliance on compensation payments and new investment by the west.

Could there be an internal uprising, with crowds demanding regime change? This is highly improbable. The system is too repressive and most North Koreans have no conception of any alternative. With foreign TV jammed, and laptop and smartphone ownership restricted, they are cut off from almost all outside news. The only change that experts predict is no change at all. They believe the North Korean military might grow tired of the Kim dynasty and seek to establish a military junta in its place. But if that is right, surely the early death of Kim Jong-il and the emergence of the young and inexperienced Kim Jong-un was the moment. In office he has proved more ruthless than his baby-face looks suggest. Three defence ministers and four chiefs of the army's general staff have been replaced and five of the seven men who escorted his father's hearse two years ago have been removed or disappeared. His uncle was machine-gunned to death.

Some of these last points are not in French's book, which occasionally feels, especially in the economic chapters, as though it should have been updated. But it is still an admirably clear and calm survey of one of the hardest countries in the world to report on.

• Jonathan Steele is a former chief foreign correspondent for the Guardian. His latest book is Ghosts of Afghanistan: the Haunted Battleground.

View the original article here

THE EMERGENCY STATE: America's Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs

THE EMERGENCY STATE: America's Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs - Washington Post Book Reviews « ArcaMax Publishing ArcaMax News & Entertainment by Email Home Topics Categories on ArcaMax

Automotive Business Current News Entertainment Games Gardening Health Home & Consumer Knowledge Life Advice Parents Pets Politics Recipes Religion & Spirituality Science & Technology Senior Living Sports Travel & Leisure Weather Women News News on ArcaMax

Automotive News Business News Cats & Dogs News Entertainment News Health & Fitness History & Quotes Home and Consumer News News & Features Parenting News Political News Religious News Science & Technology News Senior Living News UK News Weather News Women's News

View all News »

Columns Columns on ArcaMax

Automotive Business Entertainment Games Health Home & Consumer Knowledge Life Advice Parents Pets Politics Recipes Religion & Spirituality Senior Living Travel & Leisure

View all Columns »

Comics Popular Comics on ArcaMax

BC Baby Blues Beetle Bailey Blondie Family Circus Garfield Hagar the Horrible Pickles Wizard of Id Zits

View all Comics »

Videos Videos on ArcaMax

Automotive Videos Business Videos Current News Videos Entertainment Videos Essential Home Daily Video Game Videos Gardening Videos Healthy Life Daily Video History Videos Life Advice Videos Parents Videos Personal Finance Videos Pets Video Politics Video Recipe Videos Religion Videos Senior Living Videos Sports Video Tech Videos Travel Video Video Games Wine and Dine Daily Video Women Video

View all Videos »

  Washington Post Book Reviews / Entertainment / ArcaMax LOGIN | REGISTER Subscribe to Washington Post Book Reviews newsletter ( Privacy Policy )

Washington Post book reviewers

Author Bio RSS Facebook Comments

THE EMERGENCY STATE: America's Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs May 25, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS Tweet

THE EMERGENCY STATE: America's Pursuit of Absolute Security at All CostsDavid C. Unger
Penguin Press
ISBN 978-1594203244
359 pages
$27.95

PERMANENT EMERGENCY: Inside the TSA and the Fight for the Future of American SecurityKip Hawley and Nathan Means
Palgrave McMillan
ISBN 978-0230120952
260 pages
$27

Reviewed by Karen J. Greenberg

Last year a Newsweek article made public Barack Obama's presidential reading list. Its message was promising: A third of the books focused on former presidencies. Yet according to "The Emergency State," David Unger's ambitious and valuable overview of 20th-century presidents and national security, Obama has unfortunately picked up the bad habits of his predecessors. They have created what Unger calls emergency state government - policies by which America's security interests are defined with an ever-increasing expansiveness. Over the last century, Unger argues, America's presidents have incrementally institutionalized the emergency state and in so doing have weakened the country morally, constitutionally, financially and most of all in terms of security itself.

According to Unger, a longtime foreign affairs editorial writer for the New York Times, the rationale for the emergency state emerged in the early 1900s with Woodrow Wilson's evangelical promise to make the world safe for democracy. But it took the personality and genius of Franklin Roosevelt, the godfather of the emergency state, to put into place its more unsavory elements. In the name of national security, FDR enhanced executive power; crafted foreign policy in secret and devious ways; authorized far-reaching and possibly illegal policies against Japanese-Americans; and misled the public about his true intentions and his behind-the scenes directives.

After FDR, both Republican and Democratic presidents set the pattern of the emergency state. Truman "locked in (its) policies and politics" by waging an all-encompassing cold war rather than pursuing a more nuanced relationship with Soviet Russia, and overseeing the passage of the 1947 National Security Act, which created the architecture of emergency state government: the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council. Eisenhower authorized the CIA's policy of toppling governments around the globe. And, in a move that Unger finds unforgivable, Kennedy made the executive unaccountable for its decisions by creating the position of national security adviser, a post subject neither to congressional confirmation nor oversight.

For Unger, all this undermines the Constitution and violates the intent of the country's founders and 19th-century presidents to steer clear of foreign entanglements. By the time Lyndon Johnson entered the White House, all the elements of the emergency state were in place, and each successive president chose entanglements and evasion over transparency, legality and independence. Following "his political mentor and presidential model," FDR, Johnson lied to the public about his intentions to escalate the American presence in Vietnam, bypassing Congress and relying on covert operations to do so - and ultimately deciding not to seek re-election in 1968 as a result. Nixon and, to a lesser extent, Ford aimed to strengthen the emergency state but, in Watergate and its aftermath, accomplished the opposite, "discredit(ing) three crucial pillars of the emergency state - the White House, the CIA and the FBI." Then came Jimmy Carter, singular in eschewing the deceitful and destructive ways of the emergency state but politically naive and ultimately unwilling to give up presidential powers. He tried his best to pull the country out of the dark hole into which it had fallen, but was too ineffectual to do so.

It was up to Reagan to find a way to restore the glory days. Under his command, the emergency state reasserted itself with renewed strength, along with the telltale signs of secrecy, deceit and disregard for the law. With Iran-Contra, Reagan's NSC bypassed Congress and the secretaries of state and defense and reclaimed the confrontational stance taken by Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. Once the Soviet empire - America's premier rationale for military expansion worldwide - began to crumble, it was left to George H.W. Bush to face the challenges of a new kind of foreign policy: one that focused on a new enemy, the "rogue state."

But no one seems to disappoint Unger as much as Bill Clinton, "the first American president born under the emergency state." Armed with the leadership qualities of FDR, the global vision of Eisenhower and Nixon, and a Carter-like suspicion toward the emergency state, Clinton nonetheless preferred "enlargement" to downsizing. He encouraged Americans who, "by 1993 ... were politically addicted to the role of leader of the free world," to intervene around the globe in places peripheral to U.S. interests, such as Africa, Haiti and Bosnia.

Unger's disappointment with Clinton overlooks the fact that, in Unger's narrative, Clinton, while committed to expanding America's global dominance, does not invoke the more nefarious mechanisms of the national security state such as implementing unconstitutional measures or encasing foreign policy in a never-ending web of secrecy. To maintain his position that all recent presidents have furthered excesses in the name of national security, Unger holds Clinton accountable not for constitutional violations or corruption, but largely for damaging America's economy by ignoring the foreign policy-related economic challenges, refusing to curtail the military budget, and failing to protect the domestic economy, which essentially "hollowed out the remaining competitive strengths of American industry."

Unger gives disappointingly brief treatment to the two most recent presidencies and, in so doing, unfairly conflates them. One might criticize Obama for failing to make good on his promise to close Guantanamo or to restore rights generally in the war on terror. But to link his tactics to those of the Bush administration when it comes to foreign policy decisions obfuscates rather than enlightens. To give the most glaring example, Bush's vice president, Dick Cheney, met repeatedly and secretly with intelligence officials to craft a deceitful story of WMDs in order to lead the country into war with Iraq. This seems a far cry from the use of sanctions and diplomacy that the Obama administration is now employing in Iran. Here as elsewhere, one can only wonder whether Unger sluffs over distinctions that might make all the difference.

In contrast to Unger's relentless pessimism, Kip Hawley and Nathan Means' "Permanent Emergency" provides a more upbeat story by focusing on one piece of the national security apparatus. In memoir fashion, Hawley's narrative traces the story of the the Transportation Security Administration, created in the immediate wake of 9/11 and charged with improving airport security. In matters of transportation, Hawley demonstrates, the trade-off is not security versus American values and constitutional protections, but security versus efficiency, effectiveness and public approval.

In 2005, Hawley inherited an agency whose workers were disgruntled and whose work was thankless in the minds of the consumers: the airline passengers. By 2004, TSA employees, routinely demoralized by passenger resistance, were overcome by "hopelessness." Meanwhile, the public itself was fed up, tired of delays and seemingly indiscriminate searches.

Hawley's solution was to professionalize the work by making intelligence a central part of the agency's mission. After his promotion to administrator, the TSA was newly included in the Department of Homeland Security's morning intelligence telephone call. Armed with insights into the updated plans of al-Qaeda, Hawley used this information in part to update the agencies' policies and practices.

Hawley's defensive account of the importance of the TSA extols, among other things, the passions of patriotism as a useful counterterrorism tool. Throughout his narrative he brings to life details of incipient threats around the globe in an effort to justify his agency and to motivate its workers. He brings to the fore the way in which the emergency state that Unger describes trickles down to the average man: Security is a rallying cry for patriotism, however much it undermines the country's legal and moral foundations.

Whether observed from the heights of the executive branch or the grittiness of the airport security line, the security agenda that defines 21st-century America continues to challenge the sense of safety and trust in its institutions that its citizens deserve.

David C. Unger is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School and the author of "The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First One Hundred Days."

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
Comment RSS Facebook Email Print

Keywords:

var aid = 335;var v ="faRYDBGmVx168yo3%2f3rZpQ%3d%3d";var credomain = "adkengage.com";document.write(''); Comments blog comments powered by Disqus

Related Columns Family Film Reviews Family Film Reviews for 5/26/2012 read more | archives Kids' Home Library Heartbreaking Reads That Are Also Beautiful and Soul-Sustaining read more | archives Teresa Strasser What To Expect When You're Expecting Not To Read That Book Again read more | archives See More Related News Around the remote: Television picks for... Costner & Paxton talk about 'Hatfields ... 'Hatfields' is a grim history lesson Lee Rich, ad exec who became a top TV ... China has a dangerous liaison with a ... Kidman returns to TV for HBO mini-... Bullets fly relentlessly in History ... Dave on Demand: The television week in ... See More Related Books from BookDailyCategory/Genre:
Literature & Fiction/General

The Reverend's Wife
by: Kimberla Lawson Roby Read Chapter One  |  Buy Now

The Void
by: Bryan Healey Read Chapter One  |  Buy Now

The Finkler Question (Man Booker Prize)
by: Howard Jacobson Read Chapter One  |  Buy Now

Sections Topics Entertainment Health Parents Women Home & Consumer Pets Life Advice Politics Gardening Sports Travel Comics Recipes Science & Tech Religion & Spirituality Knowledge Games Business Categories Home News Video Comics ColumnsQuizzes Reference Help/FAQ's Terms of Use Privacy Policy Login Register Forgot PasswordNewsletter Directory Company Why ArcaMax?Advertise with Us Media CenterWrite the EditorReader ServicesArcaMax on FacebookArcaMax on Twitter ArcaMax

©2012 ArcaMax Publishing. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | Advertising window.fbAsyncInit = function() { FB.init({ appId: '181830548533623', status: true, cookie: true, oauth: true, xfbml: true }); }; // Load the SDK Asynchronously (function(d){ var js, id = 'facebook-jssdk'; if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;} js = d.createElement('script'); js.id = id; js.async = true; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js"; d.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(js); }(document));

View the original article here

STATE OF WONDER

Subscribe to Washington Post Book Reviews newsletter

Washington Post book reviewers

Jun 15, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Ann Patchett
Harper
ISBN 978-0062049803
353 pages
$26.99

Reviewed by Ron Charles, The Washington Post's fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter (at symbol)RonCharles.

Ten years ago Ann Patchett wrote herself onto the literary map when she took us to South America in "Bel Canto," a novel that improbably mingled romance, terrorism and opera to win popular and critical praise. Like some exotic, undiscovered creature, the book resisted classification: not so much a literary thriller as a thrilling piece of literary fiction. Now, "State of Wonder" takes her to Brazil, into the Amazon's piranha-infested waters, and the result is another dazzling work. As gripping as it is thoughtful, it burns with the low-level fever of "Heart of Darkness," but its most febrile moments soar into the creepiness of "The Island of Doctor Moreau."

Patchett's genius here is her ability to lure ordinary people down the river of bizarre circumstances so gradually that they don't look for an exit until the forest is thickly knotted behind them. The story starts in Minnesota at a large pharmaceutical company, a setting at once pastoral and clinical, bright and cold -- in every way different from the tropical biome of anacondas, vampire bats and yet-to-be-identified plants and animals where most of this fantastic adventure eventually plays out.

A scientist named Marina Singh receives word that her office partner has died while visiting the company's research lab somewhere in Brazil. The tragedy of that news is compounded by the curt letter that announces his death. On a blue aerogramme now two weeks old, the lab director has written: "Given our location, this rain, the petty bureaucracies of government (both this one and your own), and the time sensitive nature of our project, we chose to bury him here." Eager -- possibly too eager -- to retrieve the body and discover what progress the lab is making toward development of a revolutionary fertility drug, the company chairman prevails upon Marina to fly to Brazil and investigate.

That journey "to the beating heart of nowhere" takes up more than half the novel, but it's time Patchett uses to explore Marina's past and her anxiety about confronting Dr. Swenson, the caustic director of the jungle laboratory. This is, among several other fascinating themes, a story about mentors and how they keep us in thrall long after we seem to have taken control of our lives. Marina hopes she doesn't remember, but the older woman was her supervising physician years ago in Baltimore when their careers intersected one tragic night.

Although the director is no Mr. Kurtz, Swenson is "the uncontested kingpin" who greets Marina after an arduous journey into the jungle by saying flatly, "You shouldn't have come." Like John le Carre's "The Constant Gardener," "State of Wonder" explores the unsavory behavior of Western pharmaceutical firms in Third World countries, but Patchett's microscope is more finely calibrated to observe the strange choices individuals make in the remote wilderness of their own conscience.

The result is less an expose of a vast corporate conspiracy than a revelation of human nature. Removed from the inconvenience of financial, legal and ethical oversight, Swenson has spent years pursuing her own medical vision, and she confronts Marina with both the power of her authority and the logic of her private morality. Is the famous doctor exploiting primitive people for her employer or protecting them? And in any case, will the chaotic fecundity of nature prevail over any efforts to tame it in a petri dish?

Swenson grows more fascinating with each development in a story pregnant with surprises and reversals. She treats Marina with startling condescension, thwarting all her efforts to discover what really happened to her dead office mate or how their medical work is progressing. "No one tells the truth to people they don't actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait," Swenson says bitterly. "Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth."

And yet when Marina pushes for the truth, she feels like Oliver holding up his bowl, pleading for more. All she gets are more pompous slap-downs: "I keep hoping that you are more than you show yourself to be," Swenson says. "I am just on the verge of liking you but you dwell on the most mundane points." Rude and intolerant but then surprisingly perceptive and compassionate, she's as mysterious as anything in this alien place, and her caustic critique of modernity is so unsettling and persuasive you'll find yourself falling under her spell, too.

Nothing is as it seems in this surreal jungle hideaway at the center of a story that shifts unpredictably from the tragedy of Orpheus to the mordant comedy of "A Handful of Dust." The psychedelic plants might offer death or immortality; the natives are as likely to welcome strangers as they are to shoot them with poison darts. Patchett's creation of this foreign culture and its symbiosis with the fauna of a lost world is one of the novel's most captivating elements. And the hallucinatory side effects of malaria medication ensure that sleep offers Marina no escape from strange visions.

Loaded as the story is with profound ethical issues, Patchett also knows when to pack light to keep the adventure moving. In fact, as the end approaches, "State of Wonder" crashes toward a breathless conclusion as though she's being chased by a swarm of Amazonian wasps. This is surely the smartest, most exciting novel of the summer.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
Facebook Print

Keywords:

blog comments powered by

View the original article here