I wonder if this was work that took its jumping-off point, conceptually, from Aldous Huxley’s splendid but rather neglected novel After Many A Summer (1939). In that book a Californian millionaire called Stoyte is interested in developing treatments for immortality, and hires a less-than-scrupulous research scientist called Dr Obispo (and his blithe young research assistant, Peter) to investigate possibilities. There’s also a spiritually wise neighbour called Propter, who is based on Huxley, and who has a good effect on young Peter. Propter’s philosophy is a three-horned striving after ἀρετή: “every individual is called on to display not only unsleeping good will but also unsleeping intelligence. And this is not all. For, if individuality is not absolute, if personalities are illusory figments of a self-will disastrously blind to the reality of a more-than-personal consciousness, of which it is the limitation and denial, then all of every human being's efforts must be directed, in the last resort, to the actualisation of that more-than-personal consciousness. So that even intelligence is not sufficient as an adjunct to good will; there must also be the recollection which seeks to transform and transcend intelligence.” Anyhow, Obispo sleeps with Stoyte’s mistress; Stoyte wanting to kill him in revenge, instead kills Peter by mistake; Obispo colludes in this murder for money and the book ends with a breakthrough in the immortality research—a compound derived from carp, which are famously long-lived fish. The characters travel to Europe, where they discover that an eighteenth-century nobleman called Lord Gonister had stumbled upon the carp treatment in the 1730s and is still alive. They finally track him down, only to discover that he has become sort of mindless brutish man-ape, locked up in a cellar.
Huxley’s novel is in part about the paucity of material, as opposed to the richness of spiritual, craving for continuance; and partly about the brash youth-obsessed vigour of America as against the superannuated decrepitude of Europe. Yanagihara’s novel has a similar conceit at its heart: here eating not carp but a special breed of turtle, found only on a remote Micronesian island, confers immortality, but only the body is preserved from decay. The minds of the Opa’ivu’eke people of Ivu’ivu crumble away leaving them hale but mindless brutes. Like Huxley, Yanagihara focusses on a set of morally myopic and materialist human characters; but in other ways her narrative is quite different to the earlier book.
The People of the Trees is mostly the first-person memoir of Norton Perina, a Nobel prize winning scientist based, not so loosely, on Daniel Carleton Gajdusek. Like Gajdusek (and this is the first thing we discover about him) Perina has been raising a great many micronesian kids in his American home, and is gaoled for child sex offences against some of these. Unlike Gajdusek, Perina takes 400 densely-printed pages to tell his story, from growing up with his cold-blooded brother, his early days as a scientist, his trip to the island of U’ivu (Ivu’ivu is a smaller island off this main one) as part of the team of a man called Tallant. Most of the novel is set here, and Yanagihara does wonders with evoking the richly colourly and strange flora and fauna, most of it imaginary. The book is slow-burn throughout, and only slowly does the nature of the turtle’s power to prolong life come clear. Then, against instruction, Perina smuggles some turtle meat and several of the ‘dreamers’ (as the mindless, ever-middle-aged natives are called) back to the States. The discovery makes his reputation; and the final third of the novel detail the events leading up to his disgrace.
All this is framed and indeed spun by a preface, epilogue and copious lengthy footnotes throughout the narrative—some explanatory, others nakedly exculpatory—written by one of Perina’s former students, Ronald Kubodera. Yanagihara doesn’t play as many pale, fiery games with this conceit as she might have done, actually; except (in one of the book’s rare missteps, I thought) for a few pages editorially excised, and shunted to the back of the volume. These [spoiler] include a horribly vivid account of the rape of a child. If the idea was to try to raise narrative suspense of the did-he, didn’t-he abuse those children kind, it falls flat; Yanagihara does such a good job in ventriloquizing Perina’s voice that you don’t need to have his bad actions painstakingly spelled out to understand how bad a man he is. This is not a matter of ‘evil’. In many ways Perina is not only not evil, he is exemplary in his goodness: he is scrupulous, observant, considered, hard-working, dedicated to improving human existence on this planet. He is moreover conscious of moral obligations as obligations—in a slightly Sheldon Cooperish way, but palpably—and acts upon them, giving a home, educations and new lives to scores of underprivileged children as personal costs that are both financial, practical and emotional. He is not an absolute moral relativist, but Yanagihara carefully makes plain, in a shown-not-told way, that encountering the different social mores of ivu’viu, where for instance adolescent boys are sexually initiated by older tribal men as part of an honoured tradition, reinforces his own sexually predatory nature back in the USA, where such a context does not exist and where such sex is therefore inevitably abusive. I have seen comparisons with Lolita, but they don’t seem to me really to fit the novel. Humbert Humbert knows he is doing wrong; he simply prioritises his individual aesthetic-erotic ‘joy’ over social mores. But Perina gives the impression really of not knowing that what he is doing is wrong. The novel understands that it is; but one of the clevernesses of Yanagihara as a writer is that the novel knows this despite the fact that neither of its two narrators comprehend it.
Yanagihara’s prose is slow, accumulative and her overall effects (however shocking) are never forced. Similarly unforced are the parallels she draws between the sexual abuse of a child by an adult and the ‘rape’ of third world environments by the West in pursuit of profit. The before and after of U’ivu in particular is very powerfully written: the despoiled and degraded latter day island a genuinely pitiful sight. According to Perina, his adopted children go through a teenage phase of ttacking him as an imperialist and a racist but always grow out of this, and come back as adults to apologise and thank him. This is the closest the novel comes explicitly to condemning the Western Colonial Project, and the reticence is well judged: agit prop obviousness of moral condemnation would cruidify the book. The parallels are unmissable anyway. In fact, the tricky thing to triangulate is what part ‘immortality’ plays in the book’s symbolic schema.
This is what brings me back to Huxley: Yanagihara is not suggesting (I think) that commercial exploitation is a kind of senile immortality—nor that imperialism is either. However dead-behind-the-eyes imperialism was, we can at least say that it was a mortal phenomenon, in the sense that empires, from Hittite through Roman to British, die. Huxley’s point is that a focus on purely physical or material pleasures is deeply wrongheaded; and that whilst the end-point of such a focus is not necessarily death, it degrades the capacity of the mind. Something similar, perhaps, is at stake in The People in the Trees. But having finished the book about a week ago, and found that it refuses to vacate my mind (that I keep thinking and thinking about it is one of the surer signs, I'd say, that it is a kind of bleak masterpiece) I find myself wondering. Immortality is life without end, and ends are necessary things. All ethics are teleological as well as local; all metaphysics are the mapping of finite spaces. To appropriate another Huxley title (though this novel has nothing to do with immortality): Time Must Have A Stop. It is the endlessness of consequences, perhaps, the ineradicability of certain modes of harm, that gives the immortality aspect of this novel its rightness.
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