Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Although the jacket will tell you that this book is inspired by the story of real people, leave that aside while you are reading. For King's novel is enthralling in its own terms, both about the early days of anthropological study in the 1930s, and as a hot-blooded tale about inspiration, rivalry, and desire. The setting in New Guinea. Australian ethnographer Schyler Fenwick and his wife Nell Stone have just come downriver after an unproductive stay with a tribe known as the Mumbanyo. At least it was unproductive for her; Fen, as he is called, would have liked to stay, but Nell is the decision-maker of the two, having just published a best-seller that has eclipsed her husband's dry academic monograph. They run into an English anthropologist called Andrew Bankson, the book's main narrator. He is lonely after spending two years with a tribe on the Sepik River, and urges Nell and Fen to transfer their study to another tribe a few hours away from him by boat, known as the Tam. Although he tries to keep his distance, it is clear that Andrew has fallen for Nell, and she finds she can have conversations with him that she cannot with her husband. But the triangle of desire does not play out as simply as that. The Tam (and Andrew's tribe, the Kiona) appear to have different customs from most of their neighbors, with some striking reversals of the normal gender roles. Separately and together, the three scientists make important discoveries, including the sketch of a quasi-Cartesian classification system that could lead to a Unified Theory of Anthropology. But they are also aware of the biases brought by their own personalities; Andrew wonders at one point whether an anthropologist's field report says more about the people being studied or the author doing the writing. Almost everything they see around them reflects on the differences and affinities between them, not only sexually but intellectually too. There is a passage later in the book when Andrew and Nell are typing up field notes side by side. He is factual, analytical: "In light of this conversation with Chanta, and the proximity of his native Pinlau to the Kiona, one concludes that there were other tribes in the vicinity who also practiced some sort of transvestite ritual." Nell, however, pours out impressions in an unpunctuated stream of consciousness: "Tavi sits still her eyes drooping nearly asleep body swaying and Mudama carefully pinching the lice flicking the bugs in the fire the zinging of her fingernails through the strands of hair, concentration tenderness love peace pieta." She says that if she can remember the FEELING of the afternoon, then she can recall all the details she didn't think important enough to write down. It is how a writer works, too -- at least a writer like Lily King. The accuracy of her imaginative recall is palpable throughout the entire novel, which convinced me easily as much as similar situations in Ann Patchett's STATE OF WONDER or Hanya Yanagihara's THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES. Early in the novel, Nell talks about a moment about two months into any study, "when you think you've finally got a handle on the place [...], the briefest, purest euphoria." Lily King's greatest achievement here is to suspend almost her entire novel in that period of excited wonder. It makes for thrilling reading. ====== If you just want to read the novel as fiction, stop reading this now and go for it. Otherwise.... The back cover says the book was "inspired by events in the life of revolutionary anthropologist Margaret Mead." I would say more than inspired by; virtually all the back-story is taken from real life, with only the names changed. Nell Stone, of course, is Mead, and Nell's best-seller is a thinly-disguised version of the latter's COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA. Schyler Fenwick is Reo Fortune, Mead's second husband; although changed from a New Zealander to an Australian, his contributions to cultural anthropology are virtually identical to those of his fictional counterpart. Andrew Bankson is the fictional name of English Anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who played an even larger role in Mead's life than Andrew does here; the details of Bankson's early life, including his Cambridge upbringing, difficult relationship with his father, and the deaths of his two brothers, might come word for word from a biography of Bateson. The older anthropologist Ruth Benedict, who plays a significant background role, is actually a real person, and her lesbian affair with Margaret/Nell is also probably true. But if you know such facts, or are tempted to look them up, do not imagine that King's novel will necessarily follow the paths taken by these figures in real life. It seems that King set herself a double goal: to stay as true to history as possible in all the back-story, but in the time-frame of the novel itself to be guided only by the psychology of the three individuals. She describes what might have happened, not what actually did. But so acute are her powers of empathy that her fiction has all the compulsive reality of truth.