Play Book Tag discussion

Euphoria - Lily King
Audio performance by Simon Vance and Xe Sands
4.5 stars

“Perhaps all science is merely self-investigation.”

Perhaps all novel writing is also self-investigation. The characters in this book are, as the author clearly intended, modeled on three well known 20th century anthropologists. But, this is not a fictional biography. Lily King does not even use the famous names. These are fictional characters. The names have been changed not so much to protect the innocent, but to allow the author to tell a story with the personal and professional conflicts of her choosing.

“Anthropology at that time was in transition, moving from the study of men dead and gone to the study of living people, and slowly letting go of the rigid belief that the natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model.”

Most of this book is set in New Guinea in 1933. It is told alternately in the voices of Nell Stone and Andrew Bankson. The third anthropologist is Nell’s husband Schuyler ‘Fen’ Fenwick. All three of these scientists are studying the tribal people with varying degrees of commitment and professional ethics. There’s cooperation, collaboration, and significant competition between the anthropologists.

As I read this book I felt that I was one observer in a nested set of observers. While the scientists are conducting interviews and collecting data, Lily King is pursuing a psychological study of a classic love triangle. The depth of character development is intense for a book that has less than 300 pages. Nell’s perspective is related through intimate journal entries that brought me into the story as it happened. Bankson is recalling events from a distance of time, lending some ominous foreshadowing of crisis and tragedy. The book is a tense percolator of human and scientific conflict. An explosion is inevitable.

This book raised so many questions on so many issues. It was unsettling and disturbing. I think that’s as the author intended. I wanted more, but I also think it is as it should be. The characters in this book grapple with difficult issues; gender roles and sexual orientation, misogyny, colonialism, and cultural appropriation. Close to 100 years after the original work of Margaret Mead and her cohorts, we’re still struggling with these issues.

(This is an excellent audiobook. It needed these two performers. I needed the text to absorb the rapid build up to the final crisis, and to help me think about it afterward.)

So glad you enjoyed this one!