![]() The similarities between the novelist and the scientist are as obvious as the differences. ![]() But mainly it is thanks to the novel's 42-year-old heroine Marina Singh, the pharmacologist from whose point of view the adventure unfolds and who is the strongest character Patchett has written. Partly it is down to a plot, involving the investigation of a mysterious death, that takes hold of the reader on the first page and doesn't let go. Partly this is due to the setting: Patchett's jungle seethes and seeps, the humidity and the insects and the utter strangeness of it all but suffocating its American visitors. The resulting novel, State of Wonder, is a triumph and Patchett's best book yet. ![]() "It wasn't as if I was interviewing anyone, I wasn't talking about anything, just to stand there and look, just to go out at night and see the stars, just to feel the bugs hitting your face." ![]() "I could have gone and stood there for two hours and gotten more than I ever needed," she says. On the journey (which the magazine paid for on condition she wrote an article about it), Patchett immersed herself in the rainforest, paddling down tributaries, walking through the jungle with a guide to point out poisonous frogs, and imagining the terror of being lost or left behind. ![]()
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