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|  | | “Life is a wild succession of earthshaking events and heart-wrenching dramas," Tanvir, the island doctor, at one time tells Megan. She has come to the small, remote Pacific island as an animal protection advocate and works at the International Primate Research Center, a once renowned institute for the study of primates. Megan’s love of animals goes back to her earliest childhood. At age three, she stopped believing in God when she found a dying blackbird in the garden and prayed for it to no avail. At the age of four, she decided not to eat animals anymore; at six, she was reading the local newspaper to the cows and poems to crows and ravens; at eleven, in a rage, she unscrewed the fuses in the butcher's cold storage room and took first place in an international short story competition with an essay on the hunting behavior of the common pipistrelle bat. Her preferred abode was in trees, she enjoyed speaking with animals more than with people, and could watch ants for hours on end as they carried bread crumbs along a trail. One of her favorite sayings was the Buddhist proverb, "The touch of an ant’s foot moves the rock.”
Initially, the reader learns all of this from her letters to her brother Toby. When this "news from Megan" – it always ends with the question "Who loves you?" rather than a greeting – ultimately stops arriving, Tobey sets out in search of his sister. The novel begins with his arrival on the island, where all he finds of the former primate research station are its squalid remains. The locale has become a gathering point for failed scientists, alcoholics, drug runners, and other dubious figures. The buildings are dilapidated, the remaining scientists have long since had any duties to perform and are mindlessly vegetating in the tropical heat. The only ones who seem capable of getting anything out of life on the island are a pair of great apes. They play a significant role in the dramatic structure of the novel. The scenes in which they appear cast a kind of melancholy spell that moves urban, Central European readers in a peculiar way. Tobey repeatedly finds himself in life-threatening situations. One of the novel's most touching scenes occurs when he manages to escape out to sea at the very last minute in a completely unseaworthy boat. He is joined by Montgomery, an elderly bonobo chimp, who dies during the episode.
At that point, part one ("Heat") concludes; it correlates with part three ("Rain"). A distinctly shorter section (“Songs”) lying in between provides the details of siblings Megan and Tobey’s childhood and adolescence on a farm in southern Ireland. The mother has deserted the family, and the father, who lives alone with the children, succumbs to alcohol. In order to break out of the domestic monotony, Tobey runs off to Dublin and the world of underground music and drugs. He plays guitar, founds a band called "The Agents of Anger," and earns his living by doing odd-jobs until setting out in search of his sister who has vanished on a mysterious island.
Here, part three of the novel takes place, although several years earlier. Shortly after her arrival, Megan becomes embroiled in a punishing rivalry between Malpass and Raske. She senses that a dark secret lurks behind the station's officially idealistic mission. Her search for clues takes her to a second, neighboring island, where animal and human experiments are conducted and synthetic drugs are produced on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry. Her sense of justice and unquenchable thirst for discovery transform her into a warrior who shuns no danger.
What an array of contemporary issues this voluminous novel addresses! Initial appearances notwithstanding, it speaks not only to the questions of vegetarianism, genetic research, and experimentation on primates, but also includes the dark flip-side of the coin: drug smuggling, illegal human and animal experimentation, and finally even a group of Islamic separatists who are fighting to Islamize Manila. At first, the book reads like an ecological thriller written by a do-gooder with dreams of saving the world, which is somewhat tedious. And in parts, its missionary pathos and striving for politically correctness fall short of kitsch by only a hair.
Nevertheless, particularly in part three, the largest and most exciting section of the book, Lappert succeeds in gaining his readers’ support for the protagonist and enabling them to sympathize with her fate. Although the novel is somewhat long-winded and enamored with detail, and could have been shortened to its advantage, it is impossible to put the book down for the last hundred pages. But is it really worth mentioning every cigarette that Malpass lights as the eventful final passages head unequivocally for tragedy? Much like a storyteller who gets carried away, rambles on, and loses himself in minutiae as he relates an experience, the narrator in this novel occasionally indulges in irrelevant detail which serves neither to characterize the figures nor to move the story forward.
Just as Tobey's adventurous journey and his arrival on the mysterious island prove to be a hybrid of a Robinsonade and a crime story, this novel presents itself as a “wild succession of earthshaking events and heart-wrenching dramas.” Rolf Lappert was born in Zürich in 1958 and now lives in Ireland. In 2008, he received the first Swiss Book Prize for Nach Hause schwimmen (Swimming Home) and was shortlisted for the German Book Prize. While Islands of the Dying Light doesn’t quite measure up to his previous novel, the author very adeptly rivets the reader's attention with this curiously foreign, dangerously adventurous, and shimmering tropical world, where self-righteous do-gooding exists alongside disgraceful depravity, in a world not entirely unlike our own.
Cornelia Staudacher
March 2011
[Translated by Philip Schmitz]
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