City of the Beasts / Isabel Allende

For today’s Sunday Salon I decided I would knock off the book that I started nearly a month ago, Isabel Allende’s City of the Beasts. My intention at the start of the month was to read this on my weekly trips to Seattle. But after the first day I was getting annoyed with the book and put it down. Although I had 320 pages or so left, it’s classified young adult and is a bit easier reading. I figured with a little Sunday concentration I would overcome the attention deficit I seem to have with the book and finish it.

I like the characters Allende creates in City of the Beasts. They are caricatures in the manner of many young adult novels, but they are likable caricatures. We have two plucky youth, Alex Cold and Nadia Santos. Alex’s family sends him off to live with his wacky grandmother while his mom undergoes chemotherapy in the hospital. He’s a little shy and unsure of himself. Nadia, on the other hand, is clear-headed and sometimes cocksure about the world of the Amazon where she lives. What brings Alex to the Amazon and Nadia is his grandmother. One of her wacky things is writing for International Geographic magazine. Her assignment is to accompany Ludovic Leblanc, the famously pompous anthropologist, on a trip to find the elusive Beast, a yeti/bigfoot for South America. They are to be escorted by locals, including a contingent of soldiers and a government health worker who’s job it is to inoculate natives. And of course, Nadia and her father.

As I noted, the characters are great. The bad guys are suitably ominous. The anthropologist is very pompous and useless. The health worker is a beautiful woman, and ever man on the trip is mesmerized. Together, they all set off upriver to find Indians and the Beast.

Of course, trouble arises. It turns out a local entrepreneur has designs on exploiting the Amazon region, and he needs the Indians out of the way. He is using the expedition as cover. Who is on his side? Who is not? Like all good youth adventures, Alex and Nadia are the key players. Quietly kidnapped in the middle of the night by the aborigines, they find they are not to be dinner. Instead, they spend time with the Indians and learn their ways, as well as some of the secrets of the Amazon. Is their new knowledge enough to save the Indians? Can they intervene with the unknown bad guys in their party? Read the book to find out.

Or not. I won’t tell the ending here, but a pretty decent, if unoriginal, plot is ruined by some pretty choppy and uncharacteristic actions and thoughts from the players. They kept on jarring me into what? but he just did the opposite 2 pages before! and why would anyone do that?.

For instance, at the beginning of the book Alex is sent off to his grandmother’s to live. He gets little warning. It’s just your mom needs chemo, we’re shipping you off. nevermind finishing school. also, your grandmother is going on a wild and woolly adventure in the Amazon where you will be in danger and won’t be in contact with your dying mother who doesn’t want to have family by her side suddenly. Uh, what? It would have been so much better to find a different backstory for this. Also, when told, Alex becomes upset because he’s learned there are caimans in the Amazon. This is where I think Allende’s background hurts her. Maybe caimans are the animals parents frightened their children with where she grew up, but in the U.S., kids have heard about caimans only in a academic sense. Here we are frightened by crocodiles and alligators.

Throughout the story, Alex alternates suddenly between terror and calm, with no change in circumstances. On minute he’s decided that he has nothing to worry about because the Indians could kill silently. If they had wanted to kill him, they would have. Several pages later, he’s filled with dread, and nothing has happened! Allende repeats this several times. One minute Nadia is telling Alex that a person’s true name is never to be used except by one’s closest intimates. Shortly thereafter she and Alex are flinging around their true names (both discovered during the adventures) in front of lots and lots of witnesses.

One other thing that just doesn’t fit any fifteen year old I’ve ever met in the U.S. is the issue of sex. The kids spend a fair amount of time running around naked with the Indians. In her zeal to portray them in an idyllic Indian Eden, Allende has this portrayed as natural. Perhaps. What made me go huh? though was Alex acting as if he’d barely considered the idea of naked women and sex before. Uhm, no. Intimidated? Sure. Repressed? Sure. But I guaran-damn-tee you that any red-blooded American boy of fifteen will have sex on the brain almost all the time. Allende needs to spend some time in a U.S. high school before she writes about American boys.

And that brings up one other annoyance. It isn’t strictly a problem with Allende, though she subscribes to it. It manifested itself in Tim Egan’s The Good Rain (review here) which I read a few weeks ago. It permeates so much of our writing about aboriginal peoples. It’s the idea that native peoples live idyllic lives, that once touched by modern people they will be beset by ills across the spectrum. I’ll be the first to note that white people have run roughshod over indigenous people the world over. As have a number of other races as well. But if an indigenous way of life is so wonderful, why aren’t people seeking it out to live? They aren’t. Many people are trying to live simpler lives. We often recognize that modern life has many drawbacks. But no one except the occasional crazy person is trying to return to hunter-gatherer ways. And the few hunter-gatherer societies left quickly suck in modern conveniences. We lose a lot in that process. We lose their culture. They often try to hold on to it. But to my knowledge, none of these societies reject everything modern. Because there are some things about living the primitive life that just suck no matter what, and people don’t want to live lives that suck. Plus, I’m pretty sure that contrary to popular belief, not every aboriginal tribe the world over prays to the animals they kill requesting permission to kill them first. And yet, time and time again this seems to pop up in stories about those closer to nature.

Anyway, if stuff like that doesn’t bother you. If you aren’t a wannabe crotchety old man. If you don’t start nit-picking as soon as something wrong comes across your reading eyes. If you just like to read stories of adventure, then this book is for you.

Title: City of the beasts
Author: Isabel Allende
Translator: Margaret Sayers Peden
Cover artist: Cliff Nielsen
Series:
Imprint / publisher: Rayo / HarperCollins
Format: Paperback
Length: 406 p.
Publication date: April 2004
ISBN-10: 0-06-053503-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-053503-2
Subject: Adventure and adventurers — Fiction
Subject: Supernatural — Fiction
Subject: Amazon River Valley — Fiction
Subject: Indians of South America — Amazon River Valley — Fiction
Subject: Grandmothers — Fiction
LC classification: PZ7.A43912 Ci 2002