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...Morpho Eugenia" will satisfy readers of Possession, Byatt's prize-winning last novel. It is the story of William Adamson, a naturalist back from a decade of butterfly collecting in the Amazon who marries into the family of his aristocratic patron. Detailed accounts of ant colonies benefit from Byatt's richly detailed descriptive style, and the life of the ants provides a strong counterpoint to the life of her human characters. Indeed, she is often at her strongest when describing the ants...
...disruption of the plot's family drama and provides a distraction from his feeling of imprisonment in the family. His entrapment is a comment on Victorian class structures, from which, through an unexpected twist of the plot, he is ultimately able to escape by returning to the Amazon. Byatt makes subtle use of the American Civil War as background both to the ants' warfare and slave-making, and to the inhuman treatment of one of the family servants by her employers...
...beloved Arthur Hallam (his best friend and her fiance, and the subject of the poet's In Memoriam) move through Byatt's pages alongside the mediums Sophy Sheekhy and Lilias Papagay (the latter being the widow of the briefly-glimpsed Captain Papagay who sails William Adamson off to the Amazon at the end of "Morpho Eugenia"). The passage concerning the Tennysons and Hallam seem little more than recitations of literary history, the passages from In Memoriam are poorly integrated into the body of the text, and Emily and Alfred seem less alive than their fictional companions, seeming to have...
...United Nations and World Bank sponsored the Tropical Forestry Action Plan to sustain forests, but instead the plan spurred further deforestation. When asked by an environmentalist what he meant by sustainable, a World Bank agronomist replied, "Fifty years of timber production." Even the rubber tappers of Brazil's Amazon rain forest, who along with their martyred leader, Chico Mendes, became symbols of the sustainable use of tropical forests, overexploit their ecosystem. Writing in the journal BioScience, John Browder notes that in search of food and sources of cash, these seringueiros can kill off wildlife and cut forests as much...
EVERYONE KNEW THAT CHICO MENDES WAS A marked man -- long before the leader of the Amazon rubber tappers and champion of rain-forest preservation was killed in 1988. Little was done to protect him from hostile ranchers bent on stripping the forests. When his assassins, Darci Alves Pereira and his father % Darly Alves da Silva, were convicted two years later, it was an unprecedented strike for justice that triggered a steady decline in local violence...