Andrea Barrett: Servants of the Map

By SHONAGH LINDSAY*

Circumstance, travel and science are the common threads linking the protagonists in this series of short stories, despite the time and distance that separates them.

They begin in 1863 with a story about a surveyor mapping the Himalayas, move into the present, and end 20 or so years after they began, with the surveyor's family visiting a resort in a remote part of Canada renowned for its tuberculosis cures.

In between are stories about a young woman in Victorian England who is fascinated with theories of rain, and a contemporary tale of an affair between a specialist in beetles who is finding his field of knowledge out of fashion, and a woman scientist whose career path is on the way up.

The stories reminded me of how much today's science has become the domain of highly educated specialists. While the early surveyor works painstakingly in his mapping team, he indulges a passion for botany. Self-taught, he does not expect to do more than contribute to the gradual piecing together of species knowledge that Darwin and his contemporaries are assembling, yet he and similar amateurs probably played a useful role.

Contrast this with the brilliant molecular biologist whose language cannot even be shared by the fellow scientist she is having an affair with, and one has a sense of how far science has moved in the past century.

Physical and conceptual movement is the subtext behind these stories. "What is life but a form of motion and a journey through a foreign world? Moreover, locomotion - the privilege of animals - is perhaps the key to intelligence," Barrett quotes George Santanyana in her foreword.

Barrett's historic characters are fascinated by the natural world, and travel is the key that opens its secrets. Her contemporary scientists are connected globally but they inhabit a more competitive and less open world.

Elegantly written, the stories also contain a subtle eroticism within their explorations of discovery and loss.

HarperCollins

$31.95

* Shonagh Lindsay is an Auckland researcher and writer.