The Sound of Butterflies [antikvár]

In Rachael King’s first novel, prim Victorian values come unstuck in the obscene rainforests of Brazil. Wellington writer Rachael King opens her first novel, The Sound of Butterflies, with a young Englishwoman preparing for her husband’s return home. It’s 1904, and Thomas has travelled a long, long way – in every possible sense – from the sedate life that he and Sophie shared in their English town. He’s been on a naturalists’ expedition for a number of months, collecting butterflies in the wilds of Brazil, and his arrival is not the happy occasion that Sophie’s been hoping for. Instead, he’s mysteriously altered: scarred and emaciated, withdrawn, and refusing – or unable – to speak. From here, the story alternates between England and Brazil. It traces Sophie’s growing desperation over her husband’s silence, and moves back in time to follow Thomas on his trip to the jungle. He’s the youngest and most naive of four British naturalists who head for the Amazon on a collecting expedition funded by a shadowy Brazilian rubber baron. The prize Thomas hopes to gain is a butterfly that he’s only heard talk of, a fabled creature with black wings on the left and yellow on the right; he’s planning to name it for Sophie, Papilio sophia. As the trip progresses, humidity, mosquitoes, the discomforts of travel and of one another’s company impinge on these four very different men, and it becomes clear that trouble is brewing. The novel gets off to a slow start, but King’s a real storyteller, and – especially later in the book – the narrative powers along smoothly and fluently. She has a gift for evoking place; particularly compelling are her descriptions of the glittering excesses of Manaus, a city in the middle of the Brazilian jungle, complete with all the accoutrements of Europe: tree-lined boule-vards, an opera house, and plush gentlemen’s clubs serving good brandy and Dom Perignon. The scenes where the group are holed up in huts in the jungle – so thoroughly infested with ants that they have to hang food supplies from ropes soaked in insect repellent – made my skin crawl. Less convincing are King’s sometimes jarring descriptions of everyday details: a splash of Sophie’s urine when she uses a chamber pot feels like “hot needles pierc(ing) her feet”; a snapped lavender stalk looks “obscene, like a broken bone”; a gust of wind “whooshes … like the low bark of a dog”. The novel juxtaposes Victorian primness and concern for appearances with the uncontrolled, morally lax existence of the European settlers in Brazil. Sex, drugs and brutality are bursting out all over, rampant and unconstrained as a rainforest vine or a nest of fire ants, and the Englishmen gradually fall prey to the various temptations (the country’s native inhabitants, meanwhile, are presented as noble and victimised). This tension between restraint and licence, and finding an accommodation between the two, is perhaps intended as the real theme of the book. It’s drawn out also through the contrast of the well-behaved Sophie with her feistier friend Agatha, and – rather clumsily – through Sophie’s flirtation with a retired army captain, and her reflections on her less acceptable desires. There’s a potent array of material here: a love story, exotic settings, sex, travel, colonialism, some disturbing scenes of debasement and brutality, and, at the heart of the book, the mystery of Thomas’s silence. Tension builds as the novel goes on, and King’s narrative is well paced. Yet the characters are largely predictable in thought and deed, and I couldn’t shake my sense of a writer skating across the surface of a story, sacrificing depth and insight in favour of moving the plot along, and producing, in the end, a piece of well-told light fiction. King is an interesting writer, and she’s capable of a cracking good yarn, which is no small thing in a first-time author. I’d love to see her write something that offers the pleasures of substance and depth as well as those of a fast-moving story.