I almost didn’t read THE PEOPLE
IN THE TREES because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read a book about an innocent
native people despoiled by the predations of scientific research—I’m usually
pretty pro-science, to put it lightly, and I didn’t think a novel about the Ivu’ivu
and their cultural traditions would treat science as reverentially as it
deserves. I was entirely wrong. First, I was wrong about whether I would be
sucked into the novel—I was, deeply and immediately—and I was wrong about how
Hanya Yanagihara would treat science. I suspect that Hanya intimately knows her
way around the bench, although her author biography doesn’t mention it; the
details of the day-to-day efforts of scientific research were accurate (and
lovingly, if frustratedly) rendered, and the overall boredom, despair, sudden
excitement, backstabbing, self-doubt, deceit, and unworthy-hero-worship of
science that for me it took an entire PhD to discover were adeptly sketched.
Moreover, although both the narrator and his biographer (and co-conspirator)
are characters I despised and partially recognized in scientists I have known, I
was enthralled by their story.
The lush jungle of Ivu’ivu is
so delicately and wondrously described that I cannot believe its mosses and
plants and sickeningly maggot-ridden fruit don’t actually exist in nature. (I
want to pause to point out that something as obviously symbolic as a fruit the
color and texture of human flesh that is eaten only after it has already been
infested with maggots was still both believable as a real object in this world,
and captivating to hear about in detail). The opa’ivu’eke was heart-breaking
(it is a shy, friendly turtle who the Ivu’ivu eat for a ceremony, and who is
later hunted to extinction.) The passages in which Perina returns to the island
to reconcile himself to the passage of time, the wreckage wrought by the
depredations of pharmaceutical companies, and the subsequent obesity and
dependency of the people he had once seen as so mysterious and noble are
sensitively written but quite affecting—we know there are cultures undergoing
this transformation right now, and many more who have undergone it within the
last fifty years. The story touches on the treatment of human and animal
subjects in research, how we treat our elders and the disease of dementia, what
defines the boundary between childhood and adulthood, at what point a good deed
becomes overdone and then becomes an evil deed, and how we as a society reward—or
even regard—someone who has done something wonderful and meritorious and also
something terrible and illegal. This story comes up again and again—Woody Allen,
Roman Polanski—and we don’t know how to answer it. We want to divorce the work
from the crimes, the art from the allegations, but of course we can’t. We want
to have a way to easily classify these men as good or bad, but we inevitably
brush under the rug one side or the other of themselves. Even Perina’s team
does this, when they first refuse to believe the ritual Perina has witnessed,
and then decide not to write about it in Western journals. Perhaps by not
bearing witness, they believe they can erase the act from record.
Ursula, on the other hand, in
her life after life, bears witness to too much, without having done much on her
own. Ursula is frequently the victim, and sometimes sins by omission—such as
when she ends up married to a Nazi and does nothing, even as her sister back in
England has been warning her of the dangers of the Reich—but in none of her
many lives does she commit a heroic act, or a dastardly one. Even when faced
with a brutally abusive husband, Ursula doesn’t murder him. Ursula never sets a
bomb, or sells secrets, or shows much of a character flaw beyond some adultery.
Ursula serves as a stand-in for the reader, a transparent looking-glass through
which we can see much of the twentieth century as it unfolds in Europe—and through
which we can brush up against death, and feel its cold fingers on the other
side of the pane—but she doesn’t come alive for me as a character the way
Norton Perina does. She doesn’t make me want to spend more time with her
psyche, because her psyche exists solely for me to project my own onto it, and
observe the Blitz and the flu epidemic almost first hand. Again, my winner:
THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES.
Luckily the ToB agrees with me,
and WOKE UP LONELY is even leading the Zombie round! Read the official verdict
by Judge John Green here.
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