Customer Reviews

The Undiscovered Country

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I read this book because I lived in Papua New Guinea for eight months in 1997. While Gillison got some details right, she also missed the mark on many. For example, I was astounded that the family's bush house apparently had multiple bedrooms, a hallway, a Western kitchen with a table, hot water, and a shower and tub. That's not what life is like there! I also was not impressed by the family/emotional details. . .I was left wondering why anyone would let a 7 year old run about the bush (I wouldn't let MYSELF run about the bush), or why June didn't call the medical institute the second her unconscious husband was brought home, or why her husband appeared to suffer no grief at the end of the book. And there was all this talk of worms and parasites and disease, and yet they kept traipsing through the bush. . .and even after hiking for hour after hour, they never mentioned feeling tired! We never really learned anything meaningful about Peter or June, nor did they evolve as people. Sorry, but to me, the whole novel rang hollow.

The author's first-hand knowledge of Papua New Guinea sustains this novel through roughly its first 50 pages, but sad to say, the remainder of the book is dragged to a slow death by its dreary narrative and truly unappealing characters (June Campbell in particular). A real disappointment given the intermittent flirtation with such significant themes as mortality and cultural warfare.

I bought this book with high hopes after reading the Salon magazine review. ( The author is compared to Paul Bowles--I strongly disagree.)The characters are cardboard-y, never fleshed out. Though I wanted to, I didn't care at all about them. The exotic location and dissoltion of the marriage could have made this a wonderfully menacing tale, but the natives are complete cliches and the couple themselves are silly and irritating. The daughter is an interesting, good character (the best passages involve her) --yet she, too, is stuck in cliches and seems more of a symbol than a person. The spare style of the writing doesn't help here--instead of making the story clear and powerful, it just leaves you saying. " So what?" It is not the author's fault that she was compared to Paul Bowles in the review,and perhaps I feel much more gypped because of this comparison, but anyone expecting depth or emotional engagement should avoid this book.

Adolescents, posing as intellectual parents, drag their unsuspecting daughter off to thier ruin in the New Guinea jungle.... A thoroughly miserable story from beginning to end. What is about the New Guinea jungle that makes writers sweaty? After reading this, we still don't know.

This is a story about a young family struggling with inter-personal issues who convince themselves that a self-funded expedition to do research on parasites in the back country of Papua New Guinea will enrich humanity and themselves in the process. The warning signs are all there to re-evaluate this effort; the clingy, uncomforted pre-schooler, the moody, unfulfilled woman, and the conflicted man that chooses not to see anything that causes him discomfort. The warning signs become symptoms as the young child runs wild with the natives and has been found with suspicious rashes around her genitals while her behavior becomes more and more abnormal. But, the couple plug on, convinced that they are making some enormous contribution to humanity and their efforts will somehow smooth over all the sacrifices they are incurring. The undiscovered country is not the place to try and find yourself and your life's work, as this beautiful tale demonstrates.

This isn't the type of book that I normally pick up, I'm not big on "literary fiction". It was given to me as a gift. Once I picked it up I couldn't put it down, though. The story is extremely sad but told in this hypnotic, poetic way. I couldn't get enough of the place, Abini, in the book. Papua New Guinea, as rendered by the author, is an intense and strange place, overwhelmingly beautiful, frightening and inviting all at the same time. I do a lot of outdoor exploring, back packing and hiking etc and I found myself imagining a walk through the rainforest near Abini. Perhaps Gillison got some of the place names wrong or confused her directions but she clearly knows this place and makes you feel it too. Try this book, you'll like it. At the very least you'll be moved by it.

Like many "new" writers, Gillison can craft good sentences and paragraphs; in particular, she shows fine skill for sensory details (though I got a little tired of reading about how everything smelled of pig excrement -- in just about every chapter -- as though she suddenly realized she needed a sensory image and plopped in a convenient one, so to speak). However, also like many first novelists, Gillison has problems telling a story. The plot does not move in this book; it stays very stagnant. The conflict between the Campbells doesn't change or develop. Their characters don't gain any depth. The piece starts to feel very thin midway through, and when we get to the climactic event near the end, it feels extremely contrived and unrealistic -- as though Gillison realized she had to end the story soon and so tried to think of something dramatic to go out with a bang.

That said, the book is still worth a look. It's a quick read at just over 200 pages (and I give Gillison credit for not falling for another typical first novelist pitfal and trying to stretch an already thin story out to 300+ pages). As another reviewer suggested, ignore the ridiculous comparisons to Paul Bowles and simply read this for what it is -- a flawed but decent effort, in my view. [In fact, as an aside, ignore first-novel hype altogether. The publishing industry seems to think that if a new writer isn't touted as the next James Joyce/J.D. Salinger/Jane Austen/etc., nobody will read the book. Baloney!]

June and Peter Campbell have taken their young daughter Taylor and left the cultured city of Boston for the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Peter expects to spend six months to a year conducting medical research among the Abini villagers for his PhD dissertation. June finances the expedition, hoping the trip will help repair their failing marriage. Once among the villagers, they are faced with the dangers of germs and diseases. Taylor runs free, joining the villager children and quickly picks up their language. June and Peter become more estranged and eventually alienate the villagers.

Although the premise of the story is interesting, the characters are not very realistic. Their emotions tend to be flat and they are hard to relate to. The Abini setting is intriguing and I would have loved to have read more about their way of life. Instead they are presented in a stereotypical manner. Overall I rate this book 3 out of 5.

"Expatriate literature" is one of my favorite genre, but I was disappointed by The Undiscovered Country by Samantha Gillison.

Personal observation and experience convinces me that the story's tale of the havoc wrought upon June and Peter's relationship by geographic isolation amidst a very alien culture (i.e. life in the New Guinea bush) is both plausible and credible. The allusions to snobbery and cliques among expat communities was also spot on. However on certain other plot elements, I don't think Gillison got it right. It strains credulity to believe that this western couple would turn their very young daughter loose for hours at a time in the remote and rugged New Guinea highlands, with manifold natural and human (including implied sexual abuse) threats abounding. Wouldn't the authorities also have intervened? It just doesn't ring true. Nor does her daughter's schizophrenic character, one minute sinisterly precocious and aloof and at other times a toddler content to sit and color. Another albeit minor plot element that is simply unbelievable is that an episode of climactic pleasuring of oneself would take place and go undetected in a temporary bush shelter among closely packed sleeping indigenes! It just wouldn't happen as described. The tragedy that befell Peter and Taylor upon returning to their compound in the penultimate chapter while plausible, didn't jibe well with the protected status afforded to white foreigners that was alluded to in the foregoing chapters. Maybe rascals had penetrated to the jungle, but I don't think so in the story's time frame. Perhaps June's fate had something to do with the event, but it wasn't deftly implied.

Gillison was also clumsy in her treatment of language. While she used the right amount of indigenous flavoring, she was inconsistent in the amplification of foreign and scientific terminology. In many instances a foreign term was introduced followed by its English equivalent. Just as often such a term was used with no clarification. Referring to Raggianna birds of paradise simply as "raggianas" implies that the readership are all ornithologists. Never explaining that "(tok) pisin" comes from "talk pidgin" and that it is the name of the lingua franca of PNG and nearby areas was a large oversight. This applies to her single reference to "(hiri) motu" too. Similarly, "tok ples" was mentioned without explaining that it comes from "talk place" (local language). If including amplifications was considered too cumbersome for the reader, the use of end-notes has been an effective device in other expat-lit. Her use of tok pisin was sloppy. While perhaps there is no one definitive source on orthography, perhaps one of them should have been adopted and applied consistently in the book.

Great story, real people characters that one might wish did not seem so familiar. Not so descriptive that the plot is lost and not so plot oriented that the writing is simplistic. A good read.