Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don’t know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it’s not. It’s a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it. [p. 43]
It's over twenty years since I read The Magician's Assistant, and State of Wonder has had, I think, a similar effect on me: a kind of euphoria, a sense that something unreal, or differently real, is hiding beneath the surface of the novel.
State of Wonder opens with pharmaceutical researcher Marina Singh learning of the death of her research partner Anders Eckman. The news is reported by her boss, Mr Fox, who is also her lover: he persuades her to travel to Brazil, to find out what really happened to Eckman (the letter from Brazil is terse, almiost dismissive) and to report back, as Eckman was supposed to have done, on the work that Dr Annick Swenson has been doing for the company. Marina has a history with Dr Swenson: but when the two finally meet, in the opera house in Manaus during a performance of Orfeo e Eurydice, Dr Swenson doesn't seem to remember Marina at all.
Marina is, perhaps, more suited to the expedition than Anders Eckman was. Her heritage (American mother, Indian father) enables her to blend into Brazilian society in a way she's never been able to in Minnesota; though she loses luggage and phone, she almost welcomes the freedom that comes with being out of touch with her everyday life. Unlike Eckman (whose wife and children mourn him) she has no close ties, either to family or to friends: certainly not, she realises, to Mr Fox.
It also turns out that she has a lot to learn in the Amazon: about Dr Swenson's research, about the various tribes that she encounters, and about herself. She comes to care for a young deaf boy, Easter, who is thoroughly competent in the ways that matter in this Amazon backwater, but whose nightmares rival Marina's own. (Apparently Eckman was trying to get Easter to America.) And she learns of the dual nature of Dr Swenson's work: not only a fertility treatment but perhaps an immunisation against a killer disease.
Dr Swenson is a strange sort of mother figure to Marina, a icily single-minded scientist who puts her work above everything else and who seems to hold the Lakashi in a higher regard than the company who have funded her research for so long. For Marina, Swenson and her work are the centre of the novel: Marina's own mother, though alive and well in (presumably) Minnesota, is notable for the things that Marina doesn't tell her -- the nightmares, the affair with Mr Fox, the reason that Marina switched from gynaecology to pharmaceuticals. And Dr Swenson, it turns out, does remember Marina, and has a particular task in mind for her.
I was reminded of Heart of Darkness, with Swenson as a reticent Kurtz; also, of course, of the Orpheus myth, with Marina going down into the underworld in pursuit of the dead. But there is much more to State of Wonder: the casual denial of communication (Anders' letters to his wife didn't make it far, Marina loses her satellite phone ...), the mundane dangers of the jungle, the perils of malaria and of the drugs used to treat it, the abandonment of children by their parents, the complexities of the bond between Marina and Anders ...
I did not like Dr Swenson, but she fascinated me. Marina was easier to like, though perhaps not to know. I particularly admired the evolution of her relationship with Dr Swenson: being able to ask the same question twice, being able to refuse to cooperate. And the secondary characters -- the laid-back Bovenders, who are gatekeepers of a kind; Milton the driver; the other scientists at Swenson's research compound -- are distinct individuals, with tics and traits and degrees of emotion. A splendid, thought-provoking and haunting novel: I'm still contemplating the ending.
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