This is a seemingly dramatic departure from Adrian McKinty’s usual books but he pulls it off marvelously. Based on a true story McKinty heads to the South Pacific circa 1906 to tell a tale of mad Germans, sun worship and possible murder.
Will Prior, is an ex-English lieutenant who finds himself in German New Guinea after the horrors of the Boer War. As an ex-military policeman he is asked by local authorities to investigate the strange death of a man from a neighbouring island where a new, cultish society is trying to establish itself. Calling themselves ‘cocovores’ they believe that sun worship and a diet of coconuts will lead to immortality. Will’s investigation is quickly stonewalled by a group under the influence of more than just the sun and tropical fruit and he must tread carefully if he wishes to ever leave the island in one piece.
McKinty has obvious fun telling this story. Coming off the brilliant Sean Duffy series was always going to be a challenge and going outside his usual zone is a stroke of brilliance. There is a real 19th century flare to McKinty’s writing and characters in this novel and the atmosphere he creates on the island of Kabakon, which the ‘cocovores’ inhabit, bubbles away nicely with a sinister air never too far away. The combinations of malarial fever and heroin induced dreams also means the lines between sanity and insanity intertwine until the truth of what really happened on Kabakon is possibly indeterminable.
This may not appeal to all the Adrian McKinty fans but I think it is going to win him a few new ones.
Buy the book here…
Eve Donegan, Sales & Marketing Assistant
Vojtech Novotny is Professor of Ecology at the University of South Bohemia and the Head of the Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology at the Biology Center of the Czech Academy of Sciences in the Czech Republic. Novotny is currently directing the New Guinea Binatang Research Center, in Papua New Guinea, where an international team of scientists is studying the relationships between plants and insects in tropical rainforests. In the original post below, translated by David Short, Novotny looks at how tradition can cause epidemics. Be sure to check out the other posts in this series, which will continue all week, here.
Today Mr. P. of the Fore tribe is a university student, but his grandfather was a great warrior. His aggression had earned him numerous enemies among the neighboring tribes. They had failed to kill him in battle, so it was the turn of magic. But even this has its technical limitations, since the magician’s task calls for some material from the body of an intended victim – uneaten bits of food contaminated by saliva, a snippet of hair, a nail trimming, some feces or blood; in modern terminology a DNA sample.
Grandpa was well aware of the magicians’ interest and kept a close eye on all his bodily waste products. Of course, his wife was incautious, as all women are, and so the magicians were able to obtain some biological material at least from her. They wrapped it in a rolled-up leaf, which they then buried in a secret spot. As the leaf gradually degraded, so the woman began to ail, losing her muscular coordination until she lost all control over her movements and died. Thus, Grandpa lost his first wife, then his second, and finally the third as well. Only the fourth survived the snares of the magicians and lived to a ripe old age, caring for fifteen children, her own and those of her three less fortunate predecessors.
The machinations of the magicians survived into the next generation. Mr. P.’s father died in middle age and of no apparent cause, so it must have been through magic. Ten years later, in 2006, his uncle also died. As one of the guests, already suspect, arrived at the funeral, the coffin took to shaking and so the deceased provided evidence of the culprit’s guilt. The others were ready for such an outcome and using a home-made rifle put a bullet through the magician’s head without ado. His brother made to flee the feast, but the person sitting closest to him wasted no time and slashed his Achilles’ tendon with a machete while another of the guests shot him through the chest with an arrow.
In the 1950s, a time when Mr. P.’s grandmothers were being bewitched one after another, the land of the Fore was reached by doctors from the Australian colonial administration, who discovered that the tribe was dying out from a previously unknown neurodegenerative disease, known locally as kuru. Further research showed that this is an infectious disease caused by prions, defective proteins that gradually accumulate in the patient’s nervous system.
Prions used to be transmitted through cannibalism, especially through eating a dead person’s brain. Within the Fore tribe, this was reserved to the womenfolk, which is why the disease spread preeminently among them. The brain of a dead man would be eaten by his sister, maternal aunts and daughter-in-law, a woman’s by her daughter-in-law and her sisters-in-law. It was usually mixed with the leaves of ferns, which are to this day used as a vegetable, and steamed over a fire inside hollow bamboo canes.
Kuru remains an incurable, fatal illness, though its single known epidemic ended spontaneously once the Fore gave up their cannibalistic funeral rites. This came about under pressure from the Australian colonial administration, though the people themselves never believed in the link between cannibalism and the disease and continued to hold black magic uniquely responsible for kuru. A headcount of patients carried out in 2004 revealed that there were now a mere eleven with the disease, all of whom had been infected way back in childhood, some as long as fifty years previously or more. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the identification and description of the disease a monothematic issue of the Transactions of the Royal Society came out in 2007 under the optimistic theme The End of Kuru: 50 Years of Research into an Extraordinary Disease.
The rapid spread of prions among the Fore fifty years ago brought about a change in the entire tribe’s thinking, which centered on black magic. The only way they could account for the large numbers of people affected and their unhappy demise was a massive and merciless application of black magic. While perhaps only the last dozen brains on the planet are now infested with actual kuru prions, the stereotypes they gave rise to, which would see some magician responsible for each and every death, live on in the heads of successive generations of hosts with far greater resilience.
Seen from the perspective of modern medicine, of which there are barely any exponents at all among the Fore, this tribe has been through a major, almost fatal epidemic, from which it has now fully recovered. The Fore people themselves, however, see the event in different terms, as a crazy episode of mutual mass murder, the course and consequences of which are still being resolved. The seeking-out and punishment of those held responsible, and the never-ending chain of reciprocal acts of retaliation go on and on.
Eve Donegan, Sales & Marketing Assistant
In Notebooks from New Guinea, author Vojtech Novotny colorfully illuminates life in the rainforest. Novotny provides an engaging look into the natural history, people, and cultures of one of the last wild frontiers in the world, as he studies and researches the local biodiversity. The Q & A below kicks off our week-long series on Novotny and the adventures he has faced as a Czech scientist living and working in Papua New Guinea so be sure to check back throughout the week.
OUP: How focused is your research on New Guinea’s environment in comparison to your focus on the people of New Guinea?
Vojtech Novotny: Although a few of my colleagues prefer the solitary pursuit of biological knowledge in the seclusion of their study, a majority of contemporary research is rather a socially intense undertaking. Our research explores the 
extraordinary diversity of rainforest trees in New Guinea pollinated, attacked, and protected by an array of often intriguing insects, many of them still unknown to science. This research can also be seen as an interesting social experiment, where remote rainforest villages are unexpectedly visited by an improbable ensemble of Papua New Guineans and expatriates, speaking as many as ten different mother tongues and with education ranging from six years of primary school to a PhD degrees, all of them inexplicably interested in apparently worthless plants and insects in the villagers’ backyard. It is no coincidence that many researchers who originally focused only in New Guinea biodiversity, have gradually broadened their interest also to social and cultural themes. It is such an obvious thing to do here on this, biologically as well as culturally fascinating, island.
OUP: Has working in a remote lab with fewer amenities than other scientists have access to, affected your quality of work?
Novotny: Nowadays it is easier to obtain access to a high-tech laboratory than to an undisturbed ecosystem available for ecological studies and experiments. Our New Guinea laboratory is in the best possible position for our research. It is surrounded by the island’s vast rainforests, while the research gadgets of the latest fashion can be always accessed through overseas collaboration. A bigger problem is the lack of intellectually exciting milieu, since your colleague working on some unrelated, yet a stimulating problem is rarely able to pop into your lab since the nearest such colleague is hundreds of kilometers away. No Skype conversation can fully replace those informal discussions during tea breaks over coffee, or in the evenings over vast amounts of beer.
OUP: How has your Czech heritage influenced your research, your writing, and your overall experience in New Guinea?
Novotny: Coming from a small, strange tribe with a language and culture nothing like those of your neighbors is an advantage in New Guinea, as it helps to blend in the crowd of similarly afflicted citizens. Moving to live in Papua New Guinea is perhaps easier from a small country, such as the Czech Republic, where you can expect that the random impacts shaping your life trajectory will sooner or later propel you beyond your country’s borders anyway. Why then not to take life in your own hands, pack you bags and leave for New Guinea immediately? Leaving a big country is a bigger decision than leaving a small one. I am curious myself whether my thinking about New Guinea is influenced by the fact that it is being done in the Czech language, but this question is probably best left for the English speaking readers to answer.
OUP: As a speaker of the English language, why do you choose to use a translator for your written works?
Novotny: My English is good enough to report on bare facts of life, as I do in my research papers on rainforest ecology. Writing essays is different, as their form is as important as substance. Somewhat ironically, my translator David Short can reproduce my Czech writing style in English better than myself. Inexplicably, speaking perfect Czech is a rare skill among native English speakers. A lot of interesting writing in Czech, as well as in other small languages, thus never makes it to the English speaking audience without being seriously damaged in the process.
OUP: What role have the indigenous people of New Guinea had on your research?
Novotny: Our research is being done in a large part by Papua New Guineans. While some research teams gain competitive advantage in their field of research by owning for instance a particularly large DNA sequencing machine, or having a particularly bright theoretician in their midst, our secret weapon is a team of 18 indigenous research technicians, able to stage research expeditions in the most remote corners of Papua New Guinea’s rainforests. Our research is thus shaped by the strengths and weaknesses of our New Guinea staff. We have been promoting indigenous researcher teams for ecological studies in tropical forests for many years, but with a limited success. This is probably because while a brand new DNA sequencer can be easily bought off the shelf in your local supermarket, and a bright theoretician obtained from the nearest university, assembling a research team from rainforest dwellers is not an entirely straightforward exercise.
OUP: What other books should we read on this topic?
Novotny: Alfred Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago remains, almost 150 years since its publication, one of the best accounts on biological field work. Peter Matthiessen’s Under the Mountain Wall is an excellent record of traditional life in New Guinea, while Paige West’s Conservation Is Our Government Now and Bob Connolly’s Making ‘Black Harvest’ has updates on this lifestyle coping with modern influences. Saem Majnep’s and Ralph Bulmer’s Animals the Ancestors Hunted is a unique first-hand account of local animal lore written by a New Guinea villager. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel was partly inspired by New Guinea. And, as a final non-sequitur, James Watson’s The Double Helix is still perhaps the best description of how science is being done, whether in USA or New Guinea.
OUP: What do you read for fun?
Novotny: My eclectic tastes include travel writing by Bruce Chatwin and Ryszard Kapuscinski, fiction by Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami, Umberto Eco, Douglas Adams as well as by my compatriots Bohumil Hrabal and Franz Kafka, and, last but not least, Max Cannon’s Red Meat Cartoons. Most recently, I have enjoyed Michael Frayn’s novel Headlong.
