The Naturalist
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3.3 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
1867, Philadelphia. Amateur naturalist Walter Ash is on the brink of setting off to travel up his beloved Amazon when fate intervenes, obliging his only son to take his place. More at ease among his books than in the field, Paul Ash takes a reluctant leave of absence from Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology to accompany his grieving stepmother and her young companion to the fabled River Sea. Paul holds no memory of the place, though he was born there; he was still an infant when his father carried him out of the jungle and away from the mixed-blood family he might have known. As it transpires, however, neither the region nor its people have forgotten Paul. The Amazon lays claim to him in no uncertain terms, but it also works a peculiar magic on both his father's lovely widow and her friend—a quiet little Quaker named Rachel Weaver who proves strangely at home in the wild.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
York (Fauna) juggles a plurality of naturalists in her cerebral, restrained, and intermittently affecting fourth novel. Darwinist ideas and classificatory scientific curiosity vie with deep-set propriety during a tropical upriver voyage. When an accident claims the life of Philadelphian Walter Ash in 1867, his headstrong young wife, a wealthy brewery heiress, decides she will honor Walter and undertake his planned specimen-collecting expedition to Brazil. She invites Rachel, her inquisitive assistant, and Paul, her buttoned-up stepson. Earnest if psychologically ill-equipped and loaded down with imperialist baggage, they soon face challenges to their self-assured civility. As their steamboat chugs toward Ilha das Tartarugas, these explorers suffer the oppressive weather and a jungle environment full of vampire bats, alligators, and nudity, all of which they regard as threatening or monstrous. Though hemmed in by decorum, they undergo subtle changes. The women trade their stifling clothing for trousers and begin to ponder the appeal of transgression. Paul, Brazilian-born and mixed-race, pores over his father's journal from an expedition 20 years earlier and gradually envisions a calling beyond the one expected of him. York's vivid descriptions stand out but cannot fully compensate for some character development getting short shrift and a meditation on Victorianism that would benefit from greater presence.
