I had never heard of this book by Lily King until my book club elected to read it for last month’s discussion. I didn’t bother to look it up because I like to go into books completely blind if I know I’m going to read them so I can go in without any preconceived notions. As I write this, I’m remembering that I’ve struggled with this practice in the past and that maybe I should put it to rest.
It’s not that I didn’t like this book, it’s just that I had a really hard time orienting myself to the world it was creating. And it’s a really short book, so by the time I got oriented, it was almost over.
This review is full of spoilers, so consider yourself warned.
The book starts off in third-person narration talking about an American woman and her Australian husband who are fleeing down a river as the natives throw things at them. The tribes are named, but they didn’t mean anything to me, and I didn’t bother to look them up, so I had no idea where the book was set. I assumed somewhere in Africa, especially given all the talk of the hot weather, but it turns out they were in New Guinea. At first I thought they were missionaries, but it turns out they were anthropologists.
It turns out the couple, Nell and Fen Stone, are both sick with malaria and Nell’s glasses are broken, and so is one of her ankles, and the implication is that her husband is responsible for these fractures. Other than that, we don’t get to know them very well (aside from the fact that they’re trying to get pregnant and their last pregnancy failed, also most likely because of Fen’s violence) before we meet Andrew Bankson, an English anthropologist who has been studying a different tribe, not far from where the Stones were hanging out with their tribe, but far enough that they had never run into each other and neither knew the other was there.
Bankson had been contemplating suicide when the Stones pulled up and sought shelter with him, but his section of the story is told in first person, and in the form of someone relating past events, so we know his suicide attempt was a failed one.
When he meets the Stones, he’s so thrilled to meet some fellow white people that he hurries to cover up the fact that he had just been trying to kill himself, invites them to stay, and promptly tells them about all the other tribes in the area they can study so they can stay near him. Fen expresses a desire to avoid stepping on any toes by studying (and therefore writing and publishing material on) the same tribe, but Bankson assures him he has no claim on any tribe. Fen appears to be the only in the book with a sense of possession.
Fen finds fault with every tribe Andrew shows them until they reach the one on the far reaches of Andrew’s radius. Near enough for Andrew to come visit, but far enough to not be in his backyard, so to speak.
Possession plays a big role in the story, but I’ll get to that later.
At some point, Bankson tells the reader how he met a woman at one of his lectures who gave him part of Nell’s journal because it deals explicitly with him. Nell’s journals had apparently been sent to this woman after Nell’s death and she kept the rest for herself, so we’ve barely met Nell and already we know she doesn’t survive.
The rest of Nell’s side of the story confused me because some of it was told in first person in the form of her journal entries, but then other parts, especially towards the end, switched to third-person narration. The audiobook had one narrator for the sections of the book narrated by Andrew and another narrator for the sections about Nell (both the journal entries and the third-person narration) and I found it confusing to try and keep track of those sections. Every time I heard “she” I couldn’t be sure if we were talking about Nell or someone else.
As far as plot is concerned, possession is front and center. Fen wants to be friends with Andrew, but is also threatened by him, and rightfully so. The connection between Nell and Andrew is immediate and intense and Fen is no an oblivious cuckold. He knows exactly what’s going on, so part of him wants Andrew far away, while the part of him that craves companionship with another white dude wants Andrew to stay, leaving them both confused.
Nell is confused as she struggles to be romantically involved with people who want monogamous relationships, while she herself feels no need for a romantic relationship to necessarily be monogamous. She had been romantically involved with a woman in Europe (the one who ended up giving Andrew Nell’s journal), who left her husband for Nell and couldn’t get over it when Nell refused to leave her husband. Likewise, although Nell doesn’t deny her attraction to Andrew, both of them do try avoid expressing their feelings for each other and Nell makes it clear she has no intention of leaving Fen, even if he does have a tendency to drink too much alcohol and turn violent.
Careers are also on the line. Nell has written a very successful book about a tribe she and Fen studied, while Fen has yet to publish anything. He keeps saying he’s working on something, but he also says it would be futile for him to publish anything, since no one wants to hear from Nell Stone’s husband.
In the course of trying to get possession (again) of a very valuable artifact that could make his career, Fen stumbles with another native into an ambush by another tribe over the stolen artifact. The native ends up dead, while Fen is fine, and it doesn’t take an anthropologist to figure out the ambushing natives knew they could attack another native with impunity, while to attack a white man wouldn’t go over so well.
The tribe of the dead native are furious, and once again, Nell and Fen have to flee a tribe of angry natives.
The last entry in Nell’s journal is that she’s going to leave Fen for Andrew and the next thing we hear about her is that she died on board a ship on her way to Australia, where Andrew was staying. She had been pregnant with twins, and given her history with miscarriage, it’s entirely possible that something went horribly wrong with the pregnancy. Then again, given Fen’s temper and jealousy, it’s also possible he played an active role in her death, especially since he had her buried at sea, which is awfully suspicious.
I’m not sure how I feel about this book, but I can’t deny that it’s gorgeously written, and although I found the audiobook somewhat confusing, I thought the narrators did a great job. I would definitely be willing to re-read (or re-listen to) this one in order to get a better sense of the book, especially given how short it is.