Love, I suppose, is a state of wonder. Sometimes numbing, sometimes bedazzling, sometimes painful, sometimes blissful, sometimes singular, sometimes plural, sometimes filial, sometimes paternal, and sometimes conjugal—love is a perennial challenge for a novelist. Ann Patchett obviously loves a challenge. And since a writer’s ambition ought to know no bounds, she picks up the challenge of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Dante’s Inferno, and Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. To these she adds some dilemmas of medical ethics, participant observer anthropologists, and ethnobotanists. And I’m only just scratching the surface of this rich text. Indeed there is so much here to think about and discuss and reconsider that I doubt any consensus of opinion will form on this novel for some time. That’s as it should be. But love, I think, is a central core around which the other themes swirl.
Marina Singh is a physician turned pharmacological scientist. She suffers from unresolved father love, which transfers to a kind of worship of a former professor with a powerful personality, Annick Swenson, whom Marina later must seek out deep in the Amazonian rain forest. Her task is to check on the progress of Dr Swenson’s research into an infertility drug, as well as to verify the demise of her former colleague Anders Eckman, who preceded her in a similar quest. There is something unsettling about Marina’s awe of Annick Swenson. But she is not alone. Other scientists are equally in thrall, as is an entire tribe, the Lakashi. Such adoration, however, seems to be transitive since Annick herself previously experienced it for her own former professor, and late paramour, Dr Rapp, the discoverer of the Lakashi tribe and, more importantly, the variety of pharmacological treasures which they steward. It is unsettling because such love may imply a corresponding dislike of the self. And to some extent it feels either implausible or unsavoury this late in the day.
An equally niche form of love might be found in the paternalism that underwrites the non-interventionist ethic of the participant observer anthropologist and the ethnobotanist. Dr Swenson insists on leaving the Lakashi in their natural state, despite having lived with them, on and off, for fifty years. (Her scientists have never bothered to learn the language of the Lakashi.) Yet at the same time she is secretly involved in research on a malarial vaccine which she knows would potentially lead to a population explosion in poorly developed countries where it might significantly reduce the child mortality rate. It’s a difficult dilemma, and Patchett is wise to give us no easy answer.
These are merely two of the aspects of love canvassed here. There is so much more in State of Wonder, that all I can do is urge as many of my friends as possible to read it, if only so that I’ll have someone to talk to about it. It is not a great novel, I think. Its virtue resides in its, and its author’s, ambition. Which I admit to being a bit in awe of. Long may she continue picking up the challenge. Highly recommended.