A marvelous work of historical fiction based on the life of Margaret Mead, this book is really engaging and easy to read. The basic concept seems to be that the line dividing anthropologists from the people they study is actually very thin, and that idea is not very new (but it would have been rather unorthodox, I think, among early-20th-century anthropologists.) The fundamentals - really fascinating characters and a plot that, while not exactly exciting, is definitely interesting - are very solid.

What I appreciated moreover were the various ways that the author plays with perspective. To begin with, the story is about Margaret Mead’s character (Nell), but it’s told from the perspective of her lover (Andrew), and we only hear her voice through fragments of a diary that he is reading after her death; that is not all that dissimilar from the basic problem of anthropology, which is that we are learning about non-industrialized societies through the lens of researchers from industrialized societies, who are often working from incomplete materials that are left over after a society has been fundamentally changed or even obliterated. On top of that there are unreliable narrators everywhere: certainly, the native sources, whose accounts of ancient ceremonies may or may not be very accurate; but also the anthropologists themselves - are we to trust Andrew’s account of what he saw and heard while suffering from a malarial fever? Or Fen’s account of his not-very-ethical escapade at the end? And at another layer still, there is the physical incapacity of the characters: Nell, who needs glasses, and winds up using Andrew’s brother; and the Tam natives, who suffer from cataracts of the eyes. In short: no one can see anything, and everyone is looking at the world through someone else’s lens (in some cases, quite literally.)

Another major theme of the book is gender and violence, and it falls out more or less along the lines you’d imagine: the matriarchical Tam are a peaceful tribe, and the patriarchical Mombanyo who are their neighbors are aggressive and violent. That’s not all that interesting, I suppose, but it does at least lend some credibility to the culminating scholarly work of the anthropologists’ study.

And on that topic: a relatively unexplored but I think quite fascinating theme is the duality of scholarship and sexuality. The culminating scene, which I think the author describes as something very much like an orgy of discovery, and which is followed closely by a similar kind of celebration on the part of the Tam. I must confess I haven’t thought this theme through very carefully, but I did think it was a noteworthy, interesting way to synthesize many elements of the story.

Definitely this is a book well worth reading. It’s a fascinating look at anthropology and one of the towering scholars in the field (although of course it’s not quite an accurate look at her.)