THERE is something very seductive about a modern explorer’s encounter with the ‘savageness’ of an inaccessible culture. Lily King’s latest book Euphoria is loosely based on an expedition along the Sepik River in New Guinea during the 1930s undertaken by Margaret Mead, an iconic American anthropologist who carved a space for her work in a field mainly dominated by men. Since her life is not a source but an inspiration for King’s book, it is best to treat Euphoria as a pure work of fiction. According to King, most of the tribes described in the book are also fictional, albeit inspired by Mead’s research.

At the outset we meet three anthropologists: the American, Nell Stone, who is well known for her work on the Solomon Islands; her Aussie husband Schuyler Fenwick (Fen) who is exasperated by his wife’s success; and Andrew Bankson who is British and still trying to uncover the true nature of anthro­pology. More of an intelligent love story than an an­th­ro­­polog­ical account of New Gui­nea, Euphoria gives us passing but strong glimpses of sexual politics and its impact on relationship dynamics. The best parts of the story are those where the lead characters are struggling to ignore the palpable sexual tension between them.

Nell is relentless, sympathetic and organised. Fen has “a sharp mind, a gift for languages, and a curious, almost artistic way of seeing things”. Bankson is lonely and suspicious of his own work. When the three of them collide far away from home each finds inspiration in the others, and ultimately they come up with a theory of social behaviour and individual characteristics devised along geographic lines. King’s message, it seems, is “You don’t always see how much other people are shaping you”. The triumphant feeling, no matter how fleeting, when you feel you finally understand a place is true euphoria for Nell. She is a woman who does not shy away from asking questions until she gets the information she needs because she believes that “the meaning is inside them, not inside you”. Her approach greatly clashes with her contemporary scholars who tell their students to “observe, observe, observe”.

Bankson, on the other hand, is more interested in the theory and philosophy of it all. Moreover, in a place where history hangs “suspended for months”, he takes “solace in not knowing”. He doesn’t shy away from questions like “What’s the point of anyone’s research? The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else’s”. If he feels the limitations of his thinking, Nell believes her opinion is always right.

Fen, however, “loves to live with an us-against-the-world mentality that is very alluring at first” but is beginning to affect their relationship. What makes things worse for Nell and Fen is the publication and success of Nell’s book: “Once I published that book and my words became a commodity, something broke between us”. And their relationship is so damaged by their different expectations of life and work that the two can be rather vicious to each other.

Bankson, who was seriously misunderstood as a child, finds in Nell’s and Fen’s company the acceptance and comfort he’s been looking for all his life: “I felt I loved them, loved them both, in the manner of a child. I yearned for them, far more than they could ever yearn for me”. His presence has a rather pleasant effect on Nell and Fen’s relationship. If Bankson is hopelessly in love with Nell, she is petrified to find it “pitiful that a great amount of my pain disappeared when someone paid a bit of attention”.

Nell is convinced that she has found fascinating reversals of sex roles in the Tam tribe but Fen disagrees, and never misses an opportunity to tell her that it’s all in her head and she’s just looking for ways to bend the truth to her fantasies. On the other hand, Fen is obsessed with a totemic flute belonging to one of the tribes. As the story progresses so does Fen’s obsession with it. “Fen didn’t want to study the natives; he wanted to be a native. His attraction to anthropology was not to puzzle out the story of humanity. It was not ontological”; he wanted to experience their culture, to assimilate. For Nell, her work is more than a sum of her experiences; she lives for thinking and understanding: “the story you think you know is never the real one”. She is the one fully aware of the limitations of language and how “You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can’t understand the words”.

King’s searing portrayal of primal emotions gives us some idea of what it must be like to fall in love in an isolated place where one does not have the luxury to be distracted by the countless menial distractions of modern day life. She is primarily concerned with the aesthetics of writing an unlikely love affair. For her, form is subservient to themes. Her chief strength lies in her ability to vividly bring to life basic human feelings such as love, jealousy, possessiven­ess and pain. While not exactly a brilliant work of cross-cultural literature, Euphoria makes for a light yet insightful love story.

Euphoria

(NOVEL)

By Lily King

Grove Press, USA

ISBN 978-0802123701

288pp.