The Impossible Dead by Ian Rankin

Two years after ushering in a new hero, in his first post-Rebus novel The Complaints, the incomparable Ian Rankin returns with the sophomore tale of Scottish DI Malcolm Fox, top man in the Internal Affairs division.

It’s an inspired premise – cops investigating and interrogating other cops can be nothing but rich dramatic ground – and in The Impossible Dead, Rankin marries relentless internecine warfare and a terrorism theme with a practiced hand.

Fox and his team are summoned to Fife to look into a complaint against one Paul Carter, a DC whom a young woman, Teresa Collins, has accused of sexual harassment. After her accusations were made public, two other women emerged with similar stories. Though Carter has three colleagues backing up his version (inoffensive) of events, Fox’s questioning of Alan Carter, Paul’s uncle and a retired cop, gives credence to the allegations.

Fox’s visit to Alan Carter’s home also ushers in the plot proper – in true Rankin style, the opening subplot is merely an amuse-bouche. As Fox and Alan chat, the investigator not only learns everything he needs to about the impeached Paul Carter, he also discovers what is occupying the older man’s time these days: an examination of the apparent suicide 15 years ago of a local lawyer, Francis Vernal, who had ties to Scottish paramilitary groups. Agitating for a separate Parliament, the groups used means both fair and foul to achieve their goal of a legitimate, representative Scottish National Party.

Alan Carter was commissioned to do the work by Charles Mangold, a fellow lawyer who, upon being bailed up by Fox, is cagey as to whether he is motivated by loyalty to an old friend or a greater fealty to Imogen, Vernal’s icy, inscrutable widow.

Shortly thereafter, two key players perish, and The Impossible Dead – the title perhaps a reference both to the monotonous difficulties of homicide investigation and the ability of some deceased to remain a pain-in-the-jacksy for those still living – kicks into high gear. Wiretaps, historical bombings and compromised cop work ensue.

Like The Complaints and Rankin’s earlier, legendary Rebus books, The Impossible Dead is structurally flawless. Even the most experienced crime writers can succumb to the temptation of leaving a truck-sized hole here or there in the interests of narrative momentum, and papering over it with diverting character-work and inventive twists.

Rankin respects his readership, among them many who have followed him since long before he first topped the book lists, and applies an unusual degree of discipline to his writing. Acknowledging the plague that threatens many a writer in the high-octane crime genre, he sticks to an ascetic schedule that allows him to elude the embarrassing trap of confusing characters’ names and deeds or running the narrative off-course. To wit, he started writing The Impossible Dead this past January and finished the first draft in 10 weeks, then spent the next six months editing before hopping on the pre-publication promotional treadmill in September.

Such prolific output could be interpreted as a gimlet-eyed mercenary enterprise, but as Rankin told The Independent in October, writers who have already made a handsome fortune, such as himself, Grisham and Patterson, keep writing because their work is “how [we] make sense of the world, it’s what [we’ve] always done.”

In that, the creator has everything in common with his Mr Fox.

3 / 5 stars: Rankin reigns.

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I Don’t Know How She Does It by Allison Pearson

The redoubtable Kate Reddy, Allison Pearson’s imagined exemplar of the plight of the high-achieving working mother, began her life in a series of columns in The Guardian before appearing in the multimillion-seller I Don’t Know How She Does It in 2002. The novel is hitting shop shelves once again ahead of the New Zealand release (3 November) of the film adaptation, in which Sarah Jessica Parker will portray the frenzied fund manager.

The narrative arc is not hard to follow: most of the story consists of Kate, mother of a five-year-old and a toddler, attempting to juggle her responsibilities at work and home while skirting around the edges of an emotional affair. Kate’s husband Richard is something of a cipher, a ghostly character both in the novel and his wife’s life. His spectre comes into sharper focus in the final quarter, when he becomes the catalyst for Kate’s inevitable confrontation with herself.

Kate can be flaky; she spends time she doesn’t have fretting about what her in-laws will think of her son’s lingering attachment to his dummy, she is intimidated by her nanny, and her inability to say no has her condemned to a nauseous whirligig of business trips. But not far below the surface dwells a feistiness that emerges when she needs it most. She deals with pitiless alacrity to a colleague who bullies Kate’s talented protégé, and sets about repairing her marriage with the same single-mindedness that equips her to buy a season’s worth of high-end shoes in five minutes.

These may be traits shared by the author. In the wake of her debut novel’s success, Pearson was commissioned by Miramax in 2003 to write a second novel, to be delivered in 2005 and for which she was paid a hefty advance of US$700,000. When the copy failed to materialize, Miramax filed a lawsuit. The book, I Think I Love You, was finally published in 2010, not long after Pearson was involved in a public spat with Sarah Ferguson, who objected to disparaging remarks Pearson made about her daughter Princess Beatrice’s physique.

There is also a snappishness to Kate, a sharp edge that dulls as, one by one, the balls she is juggling fall to the ground. This prickliness and Pearson’s eye for wry detail enrich the novel: Kate has learned not to return from business trips without gifts for her daughter, who has amassed a global Barbie collection “now so sensationally slutty, it can only be a matter of time before it becomes a Tracey Emin exhibit.”

As she welcomes a group of new trainees to her firm, she recalls her own sweaty-palmed induction, when she couldn’t decide if she should cross her legs (“whether it was worse to look like the Duchess of Kent or Sharon Stone”), and had spent the last of her money to buy a suit that made her resemble “a Wolverhampton schools inspector.”

Later, as Kate’s marriage fractures, the recollections become more poignant. She reflects on the agony of returning to work nine weeks after giving birth, still breastfeeding and taking a cab home every day to feed her daughter – then attempting a panicked weaning when she is dispatched suddenly on a five-day business trip.

Kate’s story will likely strike a chord with as many women today as it did in its first go-round, and there is more in it should Pearson be so inspired – I Don’t Know How She Does It’s resolution is, like its heroine’s life, far from tidy.

3 / 5 stars: A story to strike fear into the heart of any would-be working mother. 

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Matilda is Missing by Caroline Overington

Despite being the purported subject of the novel, Matilda was absent for roughly the first half of Australian writer Caroline Overington’s thoughtful new work Matilda is Missing. The early chapters are concerned with the family drama of 60-something Barry and Pat, the parents of four adult sons adjusting with ease to late middle age until one son, Brian, brings home his blowsy new girlfriend. That Nerida, at 20, is already mother to a four-year-old is one reason Pat takes an instant dislike to her – but her antipathy is moderated by the arrival of two more boys, and the happy grandparents become frequent caregivers.

Combustion comes when Nerida is unfaithful to Brian and throws him out of the marital home (it struck me that Overington’s mothers are shown in a slightly more imperfect light than the hapless but generally well-intentioned fathers – other readers may beg to differ).

In the midst of the meltdown, Barry has his biannual chat with his old school friend Frank, now a Family Court judge, whom Barry is shocked to find frail and weak from terminal cancer. Frank alludes to a mistake that must be righted, a need to “get the truth out there” – but dies just three weeks later, before he can tell Barry what he needs his friend to do. It is left to Barry, with the assistance of Frank’s former secretary, to sift through mounds of legal documents relating to a court case involving a well-known local man, Rick Hartshorn – which is where Matilda, somewhat belatedly, enters the picture.

Matilda is the daughter of Rick’s stepson, Garry, the primary cause of the novel’s suspense. As Barry learns from the files – chiefly, in a clever narrative device, by listening to taped conversations between a court-appointed psychologist, Dr Bell, and the two estranged spouses, Garry and Softie – Garry and his sister were abandoned when very young. The sister shuffled through state guardianship before dying in her teens, while Garry was adopted by a caring couple, Joan and John Cooper, whose biological son, Beam, was born severely handicapped. After John Cooper’s sudden and premature death, Joan married Hartshorn, whose prominence and wealth afforded security.

In their late 30s, following a rapid courtship and too-hasty wedding, Garry and Softie produce Matilda, but the marriage is over before it has begun, and the custody decision, with both parents requesting full-time responsibility, falls to Frank Brooks, and here occurs the mistake.

All of the above barely touches on what Matilda is Missing is truly about – Overington packs a lot of plot into 350 pages – and it would do a subtle story a disservice to attempt to boil it down or latch it to a genre.

Part of the subject matter – what becomes of the children of warring parents – piqued my curiosity as to the writer’s own background. I found her website, where she declared the book (her fifth) “fully informed by the many custody battles I’ve had to cover, in my role as a reporter for The Australian.”

Makes sense. There is a human messiness to Matilda is Missing, and an astuteness to Barry’s non-judgemental eye, that is unlikely to emerge from even the most fertile imagination. What Overington shares of what she has seen will resonate with many.

2.5 / 5 stars: Overington knows of what she writes.

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Good as Dead by Mark Billingham

It can’t be easy being a bestselling crime writer these days. With the likes of Lee Child, Val McDermid and Janet Evanovich regularly issuing two novels inside a single year, their competitors can ill afford to leave it too long between drinks – particularly if they are the architect of a complex and soulful recurring lead with a loyal fan base.

In the veritable nick of time Mark Billingham has graced us with another outing of his marvellous Detective Inspector Tom Thorne, in the affecting hostage drama Good as Dead. (Thorne’s last adventure, and his creator’s fascinating backstory, are recounted in this review of 2010’s From the Dead.)

The stakes are high. Popping into her local newsagent one south London morning, Detective Sergeant Helen Weeks is taken hostage with another man by the owner, Javed Akhtar.

Weeks and Akhtar had been collegial, even friendly, over the many months of her patronage, but what she didn’t know was that Akhtar was a man aggrieved – first by the incarceration of his teenage son Amin for his involvement in a knifing incident in which another boy died, and then over the apparent suicide of Amin by drug overdose in his youth prison’s hospital wing.

Akhtar believes his son a murder victim, and Helen Weeks is the leverage he will use to force the metropolitan police to prove it. He has chosen wisely: Weeks is not only herself an officer, in the Child Protection Unit, she also knows Thorne, who is drafted into the team of investigators assigned to the case.

More poignantly, she is the single mother of a young son, and as the hours tick by, her determination not to leave him parentless manifests in a total loss of trepidation about manipulating both Akhtar and her sometimes hapless colleagues through the regular phone calls her captor permits. The separate workings of Weeks’ and Thorne’s minds, as the former struggles to contain Akhtar’s emotional, erratic state and Thorne painstakingly sources the information the stricken father seeks, are a joy to behold.

Where Billingham has particularly excelled is in the clever beading together of disparate criminal elements: first, the provocation of Amin and resulting death; then an alleged sexual attack in prison that is given as the motive for Amin’s suicide; Javed’s highly illegal reaction to the loss of his son; and the generic, miserable murk of Amin’s fellow jailbirds, one by one tracked down by Thorne’s team for their accounts of his life inside – and what he was doing out so late on the fateful night, having told his parents he was studying.

At nearly 400 pages, Good as Dead is dense but well-paced – Billingham is far too skilled a storyteller not to use the race-against-the-clock premise to its best advantage. It would be easy to tell such a story clinically and let the discovery of the ‘truth’ about Amin be the dramatic payoff, but that would be to waste the three people in a room (one with a loaded gun), the lost child and anchorless father, the brilliant cop with emotional burdens that he daren’t cast off. The resolution is serious, moving and allows everyone concerned to preserve their dignity.

A real day in Thorne’s world would see most of us carted off in a stretcher, but it sure is fun to visit.

3 / 5 stars: It’s Tom Thorne’s world – we just live in it.

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The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman

Is there anything as sure to provoke tears as a Holocaust drama? Towards the end of Alyson Richman’s The Lost Wife I was a bundle of frayed nerves and impatience, eager to see how she handled the moments after the reunion shown in the opening chapters, but fretting, as the pages wound down, that there wasn’t space to do so satisfyingly.

Whether you are sated will depend on your appetite for extreme romantic ordeals. Josef and Lenka are young Czech Jews who meet in the late 1930s, as the shadow of Nazi Germany is lengthening across Europe, and Jewish families, heretofore strangers to anti-Semitism, become the objects of rapidly intensifying race hatred in their businesses and communities.

Lenka has grown up happily, the daughter of a glass dealer and housewife. Her parents’ marriage is exceptionally happy, her mother beautiful and her father’s business thriving. The only strain comes from their difficulty conceiving a sibling for Lenka, but all is resolved when, at seven, she becomes the elder sister to Marta.

Meanwhile, Josef is the scion of a family of equal stability but lesser warmth: his autocratic father, a respected obstetrician, dominates Josef’s cowed mother and is unduly harsh in his treatment of his diligent, accomplished son. The family’s bright light is Veruska, Josef’s younger sister, a friend of Lenka’s at the Prague Academy of Art and the engineer of the pair’s meeting.

Their chemistry is immediate, and love, of a wholesome, idyllic kind, blossoms. They are just 16 and 20, and each other’s first love: neither has been sullied by ugly experience. This is important, for the combination of the relationship’s purity and its brevity makes each partner the other’s flawless fantasy over the many decades they spend apart.

After marrying quickly, with war impending, they spend only a few days together before Josef and his family leave for England, en route to the United States. The arrangement had been that Josef’s cousin in the US would secure visas for Lenka and her family, but Lenka learns that there is passage only for her: she will have to leave her parents and sister behind. Knowing that she couldn’t bear the guilt of doing so, she refuses.

She and Josef exchange letters, plan their reunion . . . and then she learns from a newspaper report that Josef’s ship from Liverpool was attacked by a German U-boat. He and his family are listed, incorrectly, among the dead. Josef scours post-war documents for news of Lenka – whose life in concentration camps is unflinchingly, and lengthily, depicted by Richman – and comes to believe she too has perished.

Both marry others and raise families, finding safety but no peace. Richman diligently tracks their stories down the years, but what we’re waiting for is the resolution to the exceptional instant she affords us at the novel’s start, when an elderly couple crosses paths at the New York wedding of her granddaughter and his grandson. There is something familiar about her. He takes her arm, pushes up her sleeve to find a six-number tattoo, and he knows she is his Lenka, his lost wife.

Though there is rediscovery, The Lost Wife is the story of nearly intolerable loss, told with delicacy and empathy.

3 / 5 stars: Melodramatic and harrowing.

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The Lovers by Vendela Vida

San Francisco writer Vendela Vida’s The Lovers is a classic slow-burner. The premise is simple: an American woman, two years widowed, journeys back to the idyllic seaside town in Turkey where she honeymooned 28 years earlier.

She is due to spend nine days at a rented house in Datça before meeting her son Matthew and his fiancée on a cruise. The companionship of Matthew’s erstwhile sister Aurelia, whose troubles with addiction were a source of shame for her parents, is unconfirmed. But upon arrival in Datça, Yvonne’s well-laid plans are set awry by the disinterment of memories and the appearance of her peculiar landlord Ali and his erratic wife Ozlem.

The first thing that occurred to me on finishing the book was that I still didn’t know who ‘the lovers’ were – on the face of it, there aren’t any to be found. Presumably the title refers to Yvonne and Peter on their Datça honeymoon, an event on which Yvonne reflects only intermittently, instead dwelling at more length on the beginning and end of their relationship.

Indeed, Vida’s imagining of the pair’s not-so-chance meeting is the loveliest passage in a book where most of the beauty is found in the writer’s delicate recreation of the coastal environs, the scent of the air and ocean and the flora. (The time Vida spent in Turkey to prepare the novel was well spent.)

None of the other couples are easily seen as lovers, and most are glimpsed only from a distance – we never meet Matthew and his betrothed, or Aurelia’s boyfriend. On a boating trip Yvonne encounters Carol and Jimson, a disengaged but reflexively polite couple with whom Yvonne reluctantly exchanges contact details at the end of the day, knowing that “their time on Cleopatra’s Island, and her story of Peter’s death, would blur into other stories they heard and movies they saw – if they remembered any detail at all.”

Such vagueness permeates – some might say maims – The Lovers. (At times I found myself peering at the pages, trying to make out precisely what Vida was seeking to express.) She sets up potential sub-plots that never quite come to fruition, such as the peculiar relationship between Ali and Ozlem (another of the non-lovers). Yvonne’s discovery of a sex toy in the quiet house is followed by a series of unannounced visits by each, but the embryonic storyline is discarded without a satisfying resolution.

It is as if she had one idea for her story, but cast it aside when she happened upon a more interesting relationship, the one set up halfway through the novel between Yvonne and Ahmet, a young local boy who makes a living as a shell collector. It is their meeting that prompts the single dramatic event of the novel, and shatters the air of nostalgia and muffled grief that threatens to swamp it.

Vida is a writer of exceptional capacity, which in The Lovers serves to outshine her characters. Don’t be surprised if you are left with a strange yearning for the sea.

2.5 / 5 stars: Written with rare beauty, The Lovers leaves you feeling that something has eluded you.

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The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid by Catherine Robertson

Once in a while I happen upon a book that is so mood-lifting, so stonkingly readable and plain fun, that I finish it feeling the urge to surreptitiously drop copies everywhere I go, like a compulsive literary-litterer. When such a book is penned by a Kiwi and therefore just cause for a moment of patriotic pride, it’s all the sweeter.

Though that adjective crops up in the title, The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid avoids becoming saccharine through the deft application of wit and the resolute refusal of the heroine to take anything – including her own grief – too seriously.

Romance novelist Darrell – no, she doesn’t know why her parents chose that name either – is in her mid-30s and has been married for 10 years when her husband Tom drops dead from a heart attack immediately after completing a half-marathon.

Stunned and anchorless, Darrell flees New Zealand for London, where she encounters the first in a perfectly cast parade of supporting characters who add spice and depth to what will become her second life. Darrell strikes a discounted rental deal for a mid-renovation townhouse in Islington, and finds Clare, her hormonally-imbalanced five-months’-pregnant landlady, oscillating comically between tears, fits of jealousy and wild accusations of criminality directed at hapless tradesmen.

In the neighbourhood coffee shop, a haven for lonely and embattled souls, the plot thickens. Darrell espies two intriguing characters who earn the secret nicknames Mr Perfect and Miss Flaky. Upon being formally introduced to each, she strikes up a friendship with Mr Perfect – Claude, short for Claudius (the nameplay continues; Claude’s siblings are Augusta and Marcus).

Marcus, compelling in a way playboy characters rarely are, softens some of the edges of Darrell’s grief, but the hard work is hers alone to do. We know he’s not quite the right fit, and that if the book is as good on the final page as it promises to be throughout, Robertson will find the perfect resolution. She does.

With the confidence of a seasoned scribe, Robertson knows just where to direct her pen, and her choice of Darrell’s occupation gives her reason to reflect on the subtle distinctions of the genre: “Category romances are sold as a packaged line, each identified by a name like Captivate or Smouldering Liaisons, which is essentially a key to how filthy the books are.”

Occasional email exchanges between Darrell and her married-with-children best friend Michelle are alone worth the retail price:

DARRELL: He’s invited me to a garden party.

LADY MO: At Bucky Palais? Yeepers! Get out your hat!

Billed by the publisher as a romantic comedy in the chick-lit genre, The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid does tick those boxes . . . but I’m reluctant to see it categorized too sternly in case it causes some to pass it by. For it’s hard to see how the book could have been any better, more assured or engaging. Robertson is a new national treasure.

3.5 / 5 stars: Astonishingly good. A new Kiwi treasure has been found.

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Goddess of Love by P C Cast

Any genre mash-up risks making unwitting comedy, but the practiced hand of American writer P C Cast lends an air of plausibility to the most unlikely of proceedings (Greek gods descending from Mount Olympus to find their true loves in the American Midwest?).

Earlier books in Cast’s ‘Goddess Summoning’ series have seen mortals elevated to the realm of the gods, but in this fifth installment, Goddess of Love, the fantasy and paranormal romance scribe turns the tables. Here we find that high-profile goddess – known to the Greeks as Venus and the Romans as Aphrodite – lonely and dissatisfied in her marriage of amicable convenience to Vulcan, the god of fire.

Meanwhile, back on Earth Dorreth Chamberlain, known as Pea, is flailing. A resident of Tulsa, Oklahoma (where the author lives when not in Grand Cayman Island or Scotland), Pea has a plum job as director of the city’s community college’s continuing education department, but harbours unrequited lust for a spunky local firefighter, Griffin, whom she meets when he rescues her Scottish terrier from a tree. (The pup who thinks she’s a cat is something of a standing joke, and comes in handy when Venus needs to convince Pea of her immortal and omnipotent status.)

The goddess and the human meet following a chance trip to Borders where, seeking inspiration, Pea happens upon a book titled Discover the Goddess Within – Unleash Venus and Open Your Life to Love, by a writer with the portentous name of Juno Panhellenius. Pea opens the pages, utters a goddess-summoning invocation, and Venus is shortly thereafter at her elbow, vowing as bidden to bring happiness and ecstasy into her life.

Handily, Venus knows what to expect from her earthly descent and is able to settle in fast, having earlier been clued in to the characteristics of modern cities by Persephone, who has been taking diverting mini-breaks in Tulsa via a portal kept open by her mother Demeter (precisely why is not clear).

As Pea and Venus set to the ecstasy task, Vulcan, observing from Mount Olympus, develops a crush on the hapless mortal. Then Venus meets Griffin, and sparks fly. Cue what is surely one of the most raunchy, comical and inventively absurd parties ever to feature in the young-adult-skewed-fantasy-paranormal-romance-set-in-Oklahoma canon, when Venus has an impassioned encounter with Griffin and Pea becomes the delighted object of Vulcan’s ardent attentions.

Things get briefly sticky when Pea learns of Venus’ betrayal and all characters are confronted with the apparently insurmountable hurdle of the fact of human mortality, but Cast does a fine job of maintaining a largely light tone, thanks in part to her wry observations about the eccentricities of 21^st century life (Venus, fond of dispensing and consuming ambrosia, is puzzled when Pea talks of ‘taking a Xanax’, but reassured when it is described to her as ‘ambrosia in a pill’).

Fans of the Goddess Summoning series will no doubt find it pleasing, and newcomers are likely to be both surprised and amused by the explicit extent of the toga-ripping. Entertained new readers should note that this volume was published in the US in 2007 and the series has since seen three further additions.

2 / 5 stars: Strictly for young adults.

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Before the Poison by Peter Robinson

In the depths of winter, nothing beats a mind-bending detective story, and happily, August brings a new edition from one of the best operators in the game. At first, Peter Robinson’s Before the Poison appears to tread familiar ground – lonely man moves into moody old Yorkshire countryside manor and becomes embroiled in decades-old local mystery – but soon we are being led through uncharted thickets and bramble. Is it a psychological thriller? The cracking of a cold case? The tale of a woman wronged?

It’s all of the above, and more. For starters, there’s the tragic glamour of the premise. Lovely and capable Grace Fox is reminiscent of a Douglas Sirk heroine, with her triumphant wartime nursing exploits, her much older doctor husband and young son, and her management of a large, impressive home, Kilnsgate House.

The first sign that the wheels are off emerges one grim New Year’s Day evening when, following a dinner party at their home, Ernest Fox succumbs to what appears to be a massive heart attack. The misery is compounded by the fact that Grace and her dinner guests are snowed in with the corpse for two days before the alarm can be raised, and matters take a turn for Hades proper when it is revealed that Grace has been having an affair with a younger local man, and an autopsy raises questions about the manner of death.

The Crown avers that Grace poisoned her husband in order to be with her lover, the jury convicts, and in 1953 40-year-old Grace is hanged.

The present-day story begins with Christopher Lowndes, an Oscar-winning composer of film scores, buying Kilnsgate House from a mystery seller. Leeds-born, Lowndes has lived in Los Angeles for the past 35 years, raising two children there with his wife Laura, whose death has prompted a return to his homeland.

Setting him up in the house is Heather Barlow, attractive, 15 years his junior and in a joyless marriage. Naturally, some frivolities ensue, but more importantly, Heather furnishes Lowndes with the aforementioned historical data, and there is only one thing for a lonely, inquisitive widower of means and unusual sensitivity to do – figure out whether Grace did it, whether she was framed or the pathologist was mistaken, or if some other oddness is at work.

The inquiry takes Lowndes from Richmond, Yorkshire to South Africa and rural France, as a series of colourful supporting characters is sought out and delicately drilled for information about Grace and her life with Ernest. Each yields valuable clues. The careful pacing makes reading Before the Poison feel at times like opening the cardboard doors of an advent calendar – a treat, and a step closer to paydirt.

The brilliance of the novel lies in Robinson’s refusal to ever allow his reader to feel the ground is stable. Not only is it difficult to pinpoint a genre, it is impossible to predict what conclusion Lowndes will reach about Grace, or what his ultimate discovery will do to him.

Equally, only the most jaded will find themselves unmoved by Grace’s story. Before the Poison constitutes the perfect balance of journey and destination, and is another triumph for the masterful Robinson.

3 / 5 stars: Eerie and unforgettable.

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State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Of all the memorable scenes in Ann Patchett’s extraordinary outsiders-in-the-Amazon novel State of Wonder, the passage in which a small boy fights an anaconda might be the most brain-searing. As the protagonist, Dr Marina Singh, struggles to pull the snake from his body as it slowly squeezes away his life, the tail begins “to wrap around her wrist. It was a muscle like nothing she had ever encountered. It did not fight against her. It did not notice her.”

But then, it’s hard to pick just one: it’s a tale in which a Caesarean section is performed on a septuagenarian, and deep in a jungle alive with mosquitoes, a tribe lives free from malaria. That it all makes perfect sense, could be no other way, is testament to Patchett’s inventiveness and dexterity as a storyteller.

The boy in question is Easter, a deaf-mute abandoned by his tribe who has fetched up with the enigmatic, brilliant Dr Annick Swenson, like Marina an employee of pharmaceutical company Vogel. Eight years ago Swenson ventured into the wilds of Brazil to uncover the secrets of a hyper-fertile tribe, and she is yet to present her results. Increasingly impatient, Vogel has dispatched one Dr Anders Eckman to retrieve her, but as the novel opens, Marina receives a letter from Swenson announcing his death from fever.

Stricken both for herself – she and Eckman shared a laboratory for years – and for his wife and sons, and seeking respite from a tentative relationship with another, older colleague, Marina takes over Eckman’s mission to lure Swenson back.

The title may refer to many facets of this treasure-chest of a story: the boundless mysteries of this Amazonian settlement and the fecund Lakashi; the professional obsession that drives Swenson to subject herself to experimentation; the dream-state, a mixture of horror, fear, fascination and joy, that characterizes Marina’s experience in the jungle; and the reader’s absorption in a story of incomparable majesty.

Swenson’s two areas of research are counterpoints: her discoveries about the reasons for the prolonged fertility of Lakashi women (Marina is confronted by the sight of a heavily pregnant 70-something on more than one occasion, and the Lakashi birth rate is five times that of other tribes in the region) will be of enormous value in the West, where infertility is on the rise in some demographics.

Meanwhile, what this research has revealed about the unique local flora leads Swenson to discover an apparent natural inoculation against malaria, still a widely fatal disease in many tropical developing countries.

Patchett’s mastery of a world in which many writers have stumbled is perhaps the most notable aspect of this deeply impressive work. State of Wonder, in theme and nature, is subject to comparison with Joseph Conrad’s seminal Heart of Darkness, but its feminine perspective and distinctly 21^st-century sensibility are among many marked differences between the two.

She creates heart-wrenching scenarios that are neither melodramatic nor unempathetic, merely human. The idiosyncrasies of the Lakashi are presented as no more peculiar than that of Swenson, and watching the latter’s impenetrable cloak fall, her secrets surface, is thrilling. As if infused with the seemingly magic plants she describes in her story, Patchett has put the human condition under a microscope and emerged with a novel of lasting greatness.

4 / 5 stars: A tale of the unexpected, told by a virtuoso.

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