The new wizard of Oz
John de Falbe
A FEW SHORT NOTES ON TROPICAL BUTTERFLIES
by John Murray Penguin, £14.99, pp. 274, ISBN 0670913472
Two kinds of character predominate in the eight stories comprising this superb collection. There are taxonomists: a butterfly collector, a beetle collector, a doctor who tad a familiarity with the organisms that cause infectious diarrhoea that was precise and detailed'. And there are those who try to relieve suffering: five of the stories contain medics. The two characters often overlap. The author himself (an Australian) trained as a doctor, and his clinical facility for classifying things is evident in all the stories.
A vital tension runs through the book between the practical value of ordering the world (treating disease etc) and the moral value of this sort of expertise. The clearest instance is in the final story, 'Acts of Memory. Wisdom of Man', which takes place in Iowa. Harry, the narrator, is the son of Ishfaq, an Oxford-educated Indian doctor who left India with his wife and sons in disgust after Partition. Ishfaq believes in science. Darwin and America, and he despises whatever he perceives as disorder — mental, civil, religious, domestic. He is heroic in his beliefs, but when the older son, a brilliant athlete, commits an act which has to be viewed as disordered, they emerge as unsustainable. Not wishing to give it away, it is a supremely American act, for which he has to pay in a way that the mother (who misses India) can see is itself tragically disordered. The narrator seemed to have some of his mother's wisdom, but he responds to the story's denouement by espousing his father's attitude to life. In him, however, it is not heroic but narrow, even though he has 'a familiarity with the posterior segment of the eye that most men do not, and I can restore vision with this knowledge and my surgical skills'.
Murray moves effortlessly around the globe — the slums of Bombay, New Guinea, Africa, Australia, Florida, the Himalayas, Iowa — but it is his thematic range that is really extraordinary. It is tempting to say that the title story is about memory and identity: a man contracts a brain disease leading to loss of memory while tracking down the largest butterfly in the world; his grandson (the narrator) loses his surgical skills by drinking, which is itself a symptom of his lifelong inability to get over the loss of his sister as a child. Two others stories could be said to be love stories. There is an abiding concern for those in crisis and transition, for immigrants and people coping with loss. But there is a danger of misrepresenting the stories by reducing them in this way, for each one is about many things, and yet is tight and brilliantly crafted. Murray exhibits a vast frame of reference without seeming to show off. The scope of the stories is integrated perfectly with the characters; his prose is direct and elegant. He has addressed the complexity of the modern world without sacrificing subtlety or humanity. It is a privilege to review this exceptional achievement.
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