Book Review: State of Wonder

 I often find there’s a fine line between fiction that’s pedantic and hard to read--too much like work for school, not enough like reading for fun--and the really light, fluffy beach reads that I don’t tend to like very much.  Lucky for me, I’ve just discovered Ann Patchett and she fits neatly in the space between.  Her books are compelling and easy to read, but leave you thinking and wanting to talk, explore ideas, and then read some more.  State of Wonder had me tearing through pages, stopping to take notes and fold down corners, and then sprinting ahead to see what happened.  I could not put it down.

The premise of the book sounds kind of crazy, a cross between Heart of Darkness and a thriller movie plot, but Patchett somehow makes it all work together so seamlessly that you never pause to think “wait a minute...what?”  The summary is:  As Dr. Marina Singh embarks upon an uncertain odyssey into the insect-infested Amazon, she will be forced to surrender herself to the lush but forbidding world that awaits within the jungle. Charged with finding her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson, a researcher who has disappeared while working on a valuable new drug, she will have to confront her own memories of tragedy and sacrifice as she journeys into the unforgiving heart of darkness.

Dr. Singh is at first one of those characters who seems to be an observer of their own life instead of an active participant.  Perhaps it’s from growing up an Indian American in snowy, whitewashed Minnesota, but she’s so meek and passive you want to shake her.  Luckily, life shakes her up in the form of the assignment from her employer to go to the Amazon and bring back the possessions of her former officemate, a man who died while trying to retrieve yet another employee, this one conducting fertility research in Brazil.  

Once she arrives in South America, everything is turned on its head.  Marina has trouble finding Dr. Swenson, a woman who has made it her job to be hard to find.  She loses her luggage and ditches the GPS telephone and malaria medication she’s instructed to protect with her life.  Once she reaches the research station, if one could call it that, the jungle seems hell bent on driving her back out.  It’s only when Marina begins to take an active role in her life--all but adopting a young boy from the Amazon, conducting a c-section on a native woman, and pushing Dr. Swenson to answer some big questions about the nature of her research and her secret agenda, that Marina seems less like a passerby and more like someone who has “gone native” in her own life.

There’s so much to say about the book, but one thing I was struck by is the theme that although humans want to tame nature and put it in little vials and make it conform to our needs, when encountered in full force, nature is difficult, unwelcoming, and indifferent to human comfort.  So great is its power that it ultimately thwarts even the inimitable force that is Dr. Swenson.  Take, for example, this excerpt:  “She had thought the water was the line where civilization fell away.  But as they glided between two thick walls of breathing vegetation she realized she was in another world entirely, and that she would see civilization drop away again and again before they reached their final destination.  All Marina could see was green.  The sky, the water, the bark of the trees:  everything that wasn’t green became green.”  Marina is forced, by the Lakashi people, by Dr. Swenson, and by the Amazon to continuously re-examine what civilization is to her, and to keep fitting that definition into smaller and smaller boxes so that by the time she realizes it, she seems to be standing outside that box, in a rain forest in South America.  

The ending is a surprise for sure, and probably the one complaint I’ve heard about the book.  It was an ending I loved though, and hadn’t admitted to myself that I wanted to read until I’d actually finished the book.

If you loved Heart of Darkness or The Poisonwood Bible, read State of Wonder.

 

Disclosure: TLC Book Tours provided me with a complimentary copy of this book to review. The opinions and views are all mine.