Word: mallabar
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...starters, take a charismatic scientist in west Africa, someone whose fictional career parallels Jane Goodall's or Dian Fossey's. Eugene Mallabar began by making scrupulous and original studies of chimpanzees during the 1950s and became a celebrity when his first best seller, The Peaceful Primate, was published. Documentaries, TV shows, citations and honorary degrees -- even a national park -- all followed, and Mallabar grew rich...
...reckless, boundingly readable fifth novel, British writer William Boyd picks up the story at the point where Mallabar, in glamorous, leonine middle age, has lost track of the scruples part of his success formula. His nemesis is Hope Clearwater, who is on the lam from a troubled marriage in England and working as one of several learned acolytes who patiently observe and record the diurnal activities of chimps. She is assigned a small number of animals who have separated from the main group, and almost at once she stumbles on big news. Peaceful primates? Strictly sloganeering. The chimps are capable...
...chimps and their keepers are not the only ones at war here. Various local factions are engaged in obscure hostilities that threaten the flow of money into Mallabar's coffers, and at one point Hope and a fellow researcher are kidnapped by an armed student volleyball team. Boyd also tries his hand at a fashionable fictional device -- passages of italicized commentary interspersed through the narrative. He doesn't need this kind of frill, but when he is not being pompous, he makes his point: the chapter in which Hope is kidnapped by the volleyballers is preceded by a deadpan account...
...author has a bigger target in mind than literary devices. Both Mallabar and John Clearwater, Hope's mathematician husband, are scientists who become so obsessed with their theories that they lose their grip on real life. Hope, whose previous job had been classifying 147 ancient hedgerows in south Dorset, falls in love with John's billowing dreams: "What I want to do," he says, "is write the geometry of a wave...
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