Marina has the job of having to tell Eckman’s wife - who has three children by him, lives dependently on him and needs him and his income absolutely. That’s why the company is funding the mysterious enigmatic Dr Swenson. Probably the Waugh-like joke in Patchett’s mind is poor female creatures, who would want this, and the paradox of our irrational world that a drug or herb which might cause this would sell terrifically. An ominous note is hit when Swenson says it was hard to bury the corpse - such was its state? This great research concerns finding out how the women of a strange tribe, the Lakasi, manage to keep getting pregnant to a very old age. It’s written by Dr Annick Swenson who is as concerned to report the weather and make enigmatic references to her great research more than tell of how this relatively young man died.
Patchett’s disingenuous literary allusions remind me of how she claimed her Bel Canto was modelled on Mann’s Magic Mountain when after the first reading, you realize she had in mind Francis Hodgson’s Burnett, The Secret Garden, or a child’s book in the same mode ( “How much does a house know?”).Īs the book opens, our heroine, Marina, a research scientist with a pharmaceutical company is visited by Mr Fox, the CEO (who normally stays in another area of the compound) with a thin blue envelope which tells her of the death of her close colleague and mentor, Anders Eckmann. Prospero to Miranda when she comes out with one of her statements of joy: “It seems so to thee.” Prospero’s only alive because he found out his brother was planning to murder him in time he’s been betrayed by all.
Like Miranda in Shakespeare’s Tempest, Pericles‘ Marina is described as finding the world “wondrous” and “beautiful” and the play is filled with “wonders” (magic happenings) we are to see the world is hard, scary, dangerous. The archetypal pattern (which the chosen name of the heroine and title of the novel shows Patchett was conscious of) is taken from Shakespeare’s Pericles, whose heroine, Marina, motherless, journeys on a quest to seek her father. Its surface plot-design is filched from the 1992 film, The Medicine Man, about “an eccentric scientist working for large rich drug company in the Amazon jungle, with joke elements taken from Evelyn Waugh’s Handful of Dust. Far from a book about medicine, South America, or grave variant on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, it’s a muddled fantastic romance relying heavily on stereotypes of scientists, so-called primitive “native” people, and upper middle class white people. I’ve decided to write a blog on Ann Patchett’s latest novel, State of Wonder, mainly because it’s been so mis-characterised by most reviews. Marina from a Sidney Opera House, Australian production (Shakespeare’s Pericles)
0 kommentar(er)
