Book review: State of Wonder

This tortuous story takes a deep gulp and doesn't exhale till the final page. Along the way, while storylines mesh and characters deepen, or drop out of sight, the reader too may hold his or her breath. Ann Patchett, winner of the Orange Prize, manipulates the suspense to create precisely this effect as she plots astutely how and when to reveal the answer to the big question that drives the story from the start: is Anders Eckman alive or dead?

On page one, when we're told he's dead, I didn't care, though Marina Singh, Eckman's colleague, and Mr Fox, his boss at Vogel, the pharmaceuticals firm where they work, clearly do. Fox has sent Eckman to the Amazon to discover how much progress (or how little) has been made on secret research into a tribe whose females bear children into their seventies. Vogel hopes to make a killing with a drug which will make obsolete IVF. It'll be "the equivalent of Lost Horizon for American ovaries" someone says, and a giant leap for company profits. No wonder Fox cares; no wonder Marina cares, she has lost a precious friend; no wonder Eckman's wife and three sons care.

The aerogram sent by Dr Annick Swenson, the cutting-edge scientist at the heart of the hush-hush work, is unequivocal: "Dr Eckman died of a fever two nights ago… Given our location, and the time-sensitive nature of our project, we chose to bury him here… I will keep what little we have for his wife."

But Eckman's wife is convinced that Anders is still alive. Thus, out of duty to their friendship - and cajoled by Fox, who, though 20 years older is solemnly, secretively courting her - Marina takes up the challenge to follow Anders into the equatorial soup. Marina's anxiety is heightened by the fact that she fears Dr Swenson - her former university mentor - whose hex is such that Marina gave up the practice of medicine for the doldrums of lab research.

The heart of darkness she faces is greater than the mere hazards of the jungle, it is personal. She is stepping into the past. Her pulse rate soars. The novel's temperature starts to bubble. Patchett calms the rising tension by keeping Marina in the river port of Manaus while waiting for Swenson, then introducing comic characters - the Bovenders - hippy Americans - along with lost luggage and a visit to the opera. Barbara Bovender turns out later to be a deus ex machina, not merely a walk-on. Her husband in every sense is pure fluff.

Dispensable too, it seems, is the Minnesota backdrop: the grieving Eckman family; Fox, with his tepid yearnings for Marina. These drop away like a loose appendage as the narrative courses up river, having found Swenson, who in turn is irked that Marina insists on getting to the heart of Anders's death and retrieving his personal effects.

Swenson's character slowly emerges from the identikit version portrayed in the earlier chapters, softened especially by her relationship with Easter, a deaf-mute native boy whose life she once saved, and by placing her in relationship with her team of loyal researchers who brave the constant threat of sickness, even of death, to find the formula for fertility, the source of which is a tree whose bark the local women chew while hugging its trunk.

Patchett risks the reader's laughter at the absurdity of it: the sight of dozens of women gnawing on wood in order to put themselves through childbirth into old age. No convincing explanation for this behaviour is ever suggested, though increasingly Swenson is cast as the narrative's conscience, even questioning her own role: should human beings interfere in the natural order or let it be "as if you had never arrived"? she asks - a question she does not answer.

Ignorance, innocence and naivety are all doomed in the face of the natural order's efforts to exterminate the Swensons of this world: poisons, diseases, a tribe of cannibals, dangerous mushrooms, and a merciless anaconda attack on Easter, which forces Marina to lop off its head, are all part of the novel's lethal three-dimensional background to its churning inner turmoil.

Overall, it is a thought-provoking tale, spoiled by an ill-conceived conclusion which answers the question of Anders' fate, then twists two of its characters into a moment of tender treachery that boggles disbelief and left this reader stunned and gasping.