The People in the Trees
Date
2013
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Doubleday
Abstract
The People in the Trees deals with the life of fictional scientist Dr. Abraham Norton Perina through his own memoir, encouraged by his colleague Dr. Ronald Kubodera, who annotates the memoir himself. The novel spans his entire life, from his childhood and first interest in science to his eventual downfall as he is convicted of sexually abusing his adoptive children. The novel recounts his start in academia, as he attends medical school, starts work in a research lab and is then invited to embark on an anthropological mission to a remote fictional island, Ivu'ivu, which he accepts. During their research, the team hears about and then discovers a tribe that bear the mark of a turtle and seem to possess abnormally large lifespans as well as impaired cognitive capacity, namely when it comes to language. Upon seeing a tribe member consume a turtle in a ritualistic manner, Dr. Perina makes the link between the turtles and their lifespan as well as their brain damage. He is then taken to the pond where the turtles originate, to which he later returns to kill one of the turtles so he can bring its flesh home for experimentation. This leads to him publishing a paper relating how eating this turtle can expand a lab mouse’s life cycle sixfold. This paper leads to both academic acclaim and eventually to the demise of these turtles, which are hunted to extinction by pharmaceutical companies, which also leads to the destruction of the island itself. After these events, Dr. Norton adopts a son whose father he believed to be a boy he had a sexual encounter with on the island years before, and he eventually is accused by this son of rape and is convicted for it. Jumping to the present, the reader discovers that Norton and his colleague Kubodera have escaped from the former’s parole restriction, and the latter confesses to omiting a section from the memoir, now included in a post-script, where Norton admits to the rape of multiple of his adopted sons. Ultimately, the novel deals with the struggles of ethical scientific research as well as the separation of the research and the researcher, in case of personal moral misconduct.
Description
Keywords
anthropology , scientific research , scientific ethics , animal ethics
Citation
Yanagihara, Hanya. The People in the Trees. Doubleday, 2013.