Published in 2011, Ann Patchett’s suspenseful and topical literary novel reads like a medical thriller. Dr. Marina Singh, daughter of an Indian father and white mother, travels to the Amazon on behalf of her pharmaceutical company in search of answers. The wife of Marina’s dead colleague wants to learn how and why her husband died on his own mission to the jungles of Brazil, mere months ago. Vogel, Marina’s pharmaceutical employer, wants her to report on the status of the drug that they are paying the mysterious Dr. Swenson and her team of scientists to develop.
Complicating matters is Marina’s romantic involvement with Mr. Fox, her supervisor at Vogel. He has given her a phone that theoretically will enable her to contact him from anywhere in the world, even a remote corner of the Amazon, but she loses her suitcase (and the phone) on her flight to Brazil. Weeks later, on a boat ride through the Amazon jungle n search of Dr. Swenson, the chief scientist leading the drug development, she loses a second bag of belongings, as well. Another complication is that Dr. Swenson is Marina’s former OB/GYN professor at Johns Hopkins.
When Marina finds Dr. Swenson, the older woman is curt, unemotional, and above all indignant that she is being asked to slow her work to provide answers to the company that is paying for her research. She also refuses to answer questions about Anders, Marina’s missing colleague, and seemingly ignores or exploits the Lakashi, the Amazon tribe whom she is studying as part of the drug development.
Marina soon discovers that the Lakashi, by virtue of their native resources, hold the secret for the development not only of an extended fertility drug for women, but also an anti-malarial drug. Dr. Swenson and other scientists on her team cynically inform Marina that it is unlikely that any American pharmaceutical company will pay for an anti-malarial drug that they would then be expected to dispense for free around the world. They will, however, pay for the development of the extended fertility drug, since there is a demand for it among women in rich western countries. Therefore, Dr. Swenson and her team have concealed the true nature of their work from Vogel and other western corporations.
One of Dr. Swenson’s semi-redeeming qualities is her interest in Easter, a deaf and mute boy who was brought to her for medical treatment years ago from warring tribe, and who drives her boat when she needs to go to town for supplies. Marina also befriends Easter, as, apparently, did her dead colleague, Anders.
The book’s themes of corporate greed and western exploitation as justification for scientific research/progress, emerge through the character of this endearing boy. Ultimately, Easter becomes a symbolic pawn in the conflict between Big Pharma and the medical scientists, who exploit the Lakashi by enlisting them, without their informed consent, as human subjects for the clinical trials of the anti-malarial drug. In fact, Easter is the lone Amazon native whom the scientists desire to help and save, and he's also the lone Amazon native who moves easily between the two groups of Western scientists and the Lakashi. Finally, he is tossed about as a pawn in the long-standing conflict between the Lakashi and their enemy tribe, who are quick to shoot poison arrows at strangers. Even the boy’s name (chosen because he came to Dr. Swenson on Easter Day) evokes sacrifice, and he becomes a stand-in for the Amazon natives whom the Westerners exploit.
Marina is conflicted by her obligation to her Big Pharma employer and her dead colleague on the one hand; and on the other hand, her desire to protect and rescue Easter. Meanwhile, Dr. Swenson pressures Marina to stay permanently in the Amazon and develop the drug with her team. By the end of the novel, Marina has begun to assimilate well with the Lakashi; she wears their clothes (because her own have been stolen/taken); and the Lakashi revere her for her medical abilities and assistance.
When Mr. Fox arrives in search of answers, he barely gives Marina time of day, and the reader realizes that Marina, too, has become an unwitting pawn in the Western fight between Big Pharma, science, and the native people whom they exploit in the process.
At first, the ending struck me as unsatisfying (and improbable), but given the book’s themes, it is also oddly inevitable. This is a highly original novel that I’m sure will continue to generate passionate discussions about the controversial, timely topics of corporate greed and exploitation in the name of science.