FICTION: State of WonderBy Ann Patchett, Bloomsbury, 353pp. £12.99
ONE OF THE many pleasures of reading an Ann Patchett novel is knowing that one is in a safe pair of hands. The assurance and elegant ease of her writing mean that, no matter how outlandish the scenario (a mass hostage-taking with an operatic twist in an unnamed South American country, for example), one trusts her to steer the narrative through even the most intricate twists and turns.
In State of Wonder, Patchett's sixth novel, that journey is one into exotic and unknown territory, both literally and metaphorically, in a modern, medical take on Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
Dr Marina Singh is a successful research doctor in her early 40s, working for Vogel, a pharmaceutical company in the American Midwest. Once an aspiring obstetrician, Marina abandoned her vocation after an incident in her training, and ever since has opted for a life of security in her native Minnesota, cocooned in the ordered environment of the lab and involved in a gentle relationship with her older boss. However, this carefully controlled life is blown open when news arrives, via an enigmatically curt letter, that Anders Eckman, Marina’s mild-mannered research partner, has died in the Brazilian rainforest, where he had been sent to investigate one of Vogel’s development projects.
As well as the deep shock of the personal loss – devastatingly evoked when Marina has to deliver the news to Anders’s widow, a brilliant vignette played out in a bright American kitchen – there are even more far-reaching consequences. The project in the Amazon, it transpires, is on the brink of discovering a miracle drug that will revolutionise women’s fertility and make Vogel untold millions.
The company has for years been funding the work of the formidable and elusive Dr Annick Swenson, Marina’s one-time mentor, who has been living and working among the Lakashi tribe in an impenetrable part of the Amazon basin, trying to discover what it is that allows the tribe’s women to give birth well into their 70s. Uncontactable and intractable, Dr Swenson has not given so much as a progress report, let alone a delivery date, for the new drug. So, with Anders’s death shrouded in unanswered questions, Marina is sent reluctantly to the Brazilian city of Manaus to find answers, both for the company and for her colleague’s bereft family.
There she waits until she can finally follow Dr Swenson up the murky waters of the Rio Negro into the unsettling otherworld of the jungle, with its “thick walls of breathing vegetation”, where the real challenges await.
If this sounds convoluted and a bit far-fetched, well, it probably is – and that's without going into the neighbouring cannibal tribes or Marina's recurring nightmares. Some of Patchett's earlier books have been more concerned with charting the quieter emotional hinterland of her characters' lives; in State of Wondershe returns to the vivid terrain of her 2001 Orange Prize-winning book, Bel Canto.
Still, even when her imagination is in full flight, Patchett grounds the more fanciful twists of her plot with wonderfully nuanced insights into human behaviour. Her storylines may occasionally test the limits of credulity, but her characters possess a solidity and depth that ring true. Indeed, placing ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances is what provides much of the dramatic tension and makes her novels so terrifically readable.
So too does her gift for characterisation: here, as in Bel Canto, she gives it free rein, conjuring up inscrutable tribesmen and zealous doctors, a suave Brazilian fixer and gilded young travellers, her descriptions often shot through with a wry wit.
Yet State of Wonder is more than an adventure story. It raises moral questions about the ethics of modern medicine, and about the insatiable nature of western civilisation compared with the simpler, if brutal, natural order of the Amazon tribes. These are questions to which Patchett does not attempt to provide easy answers, although she sometimes comes close in Dr Swenson’s sermonising monologues.
What she does offer is some form of redemption for her heroine, though not without sacrifice, at the end of a tale as dense and teeming as the jungle landscape at its heart.
Catherine Heaney is acting head of the Faber Academy, a programme of creative-writing courses and live events run by Faber and Faber
