I have had The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara on my to-read list since it was published more than 10 years ago. It was her first novel, before the worldwide phenomenon that was her follow-up A Little Life. Which I read and loved, but it is devastating, and I think that made me delay reading more from her. And it has to be said that this book also deals with heavy, shocking themes. I think it’s brilliant, but it is not an easy read.

On the first page we are told that the main character, Dr Norton Perina, has been arrested and charged with rape, statutory rape, sexual assault and endangering a minor. What follows is his protege Ronald Kubodera’s attempt to exonerate him, wrapped around Perina’s memoir written from prison. Kubodera does not claim the offences didn’t happen. He thinks everything Perina has done is justified. It is an unsettling angle from which to approach the story. And it is also extremely clever, because it allows Yanagihara to show both the full extent of Perina’s awfulness and the fact that he truly did not see any problem with his own actions.

Perina is an American doctor who, we are told, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1974 for discovering a medical condition that retards ageing. This condition existed only in a remote tribe in a Micronesian island country called U’ivu. We also learn that over a period of decades, Perina adopted 43 children from U’ivu and raised them in the US. It isn’t hard to connect the dots between the facts revealed in the first two pages, but the full horror isn’t revealed until near the end of the novel’s 360 pages.

“People are not sympathetic to Norton’s current situation…condemned and dismissed, legally, by a jury of his supposed peers – what must it feel like to be a man of Norton’s intellect and have your character determined and your fate writ by 12 incompetents (one juror, as I recall, was a tollbooth clerk, another a dog-washer), whose decision renders virtually every one of your previous accomplishments insignificant, if not entirely meaningless?”

After a few pages of fawning adulation from Kubodera, the main narrative begins with Perina’s account of his childhood. He is verbose on some subjects, such as the staircase in his childhood home, yet his parents get brief mentions only. The tale really gets going in 1950 when, approaching graduation from medical school with the realisation he doesn’t want to practice medicine, he gratefully accepts an unusual offer. A respected anthropologist called Paul Tallent is going to U’ivu in search of a “lost tribe”, the Opa’ivu’eke people, and needs a doctor to perform basic medical checks. This four-month trip will profoundly change the lives of everyone involved – none of them for the better except Perina.

As he is writing from the perspective of decades later, Perina acknowledges early on the huge ruinous changes that later came to both U’ivu and the Opa’ivu’eke, but he never takes responsibility for his own crucial role. He may not have personally hunted species to extinction or razed tropical forest to build roads, but it is his work that made the whole world interested in U’ivu. And it was his choice to publicise the romantic notion of the key to eternal life without acknowledging the severe limitations of what he discovered.

The 1950 expedition begins with a long arduous trek through jungle. Led by U’ivan guides, the American trio (Tallent has brought his graduate student Esme along) are working from rumours and legends. Even the main-island U’ivans have no contact with the Opa’ivu’eke, only myths of their existence. I quite enjoyed the descriptions of the voyage. Perina is naive, ill-prepared and doesn’t initially seem to have the right temperament at all. But he adapts, and his judgement of the guides eating monkeys and grubs feels like the reaction most Westerners would have.

Perina’s attitude toward the guides is a little racist and he shows little to no respect for their spiritual beliefs. But it’s when they encounter the Opa’ivu’eke that his racism notches all the way up. He arrogantly applies his own values to everything he sees, with plenty of sexism and misogyny to boot.

I read this book with a real sense of mounting dread about finally learning the details of those offences on page one. And it is awful when the time comes. But there is plenty to be appalled by on the way. Way back at medical school, he takes on part-time work as a lab assistant and is entirely too comfortable with both experimenting on and euthanising animals. He describes in almost gleeful detail his technique for dispatching mice. Even people who feel more positive than me about performing medical experiments on animals will I suspect find Perina’s descriptions a bit much.

So when that 1950 expedition encounters Indigenous people wandering the jungle who appear not to have the ability to speak, or follow any social rules at all, it is far too easy for Perina to see them as creatures rather than humans. Throw in racism and it perhaps should not be surprising that these supposed scientific observers start by shackling the people they find and subjecting them to tests without consent.

Though neither Perina nor Kubodera admits to anything Perina did having been wrong, they do both withhold information. Is this a tacit acknowledgment of guilt or merely an acknowledgment that they know what the rest of the world considers to be wrong? Of course we have only their version of events, so it is all skewed to their view. Did U’ivans really press their children on Perina, begging him to take them away to America? Or did he impose that interpretation on the memory to justify his harmful white saviour behaviour?

This book has clear echoes of Lolita; not only its subject matter but also the structure of a memoir by a man in prison, introduced by another man who is reluctant to label the criminal for what he is. Humbert Humbert blames 12-year-old Dolores for seducing him and romanticizes their relationship, which Perina also does. But unlike Humbert, Perina attempts to keep his private life private and primarily writes about his work.

Yanagihara was inspired – if that is the right word – by the true story of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek. I didn’t know about him before this month and I think I was happier that way. Gajdusek’s life was pretty close to that of Perina – an American doctor who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1976 for his work on a disease he studied in New Guinea, brought 56 boys from the South Pacific to his home in the US, and was later imprisoned for child molestation. He served only 12 months in prison and even that sentence was considered by some too harsh for a “genius”.

The extended lifespan element of this novel lends it a slightly SF or fantasy tone that for me was welcome and necessary. Even though it’s a clear metaphor for any number of drugs that might be found in remote, beautiful locations and lead to the destruction of that place, the impossible nature of Yanagihara’s invention helped alleviate the heavy themes just the tiniest amount.

Yanagihara published a third novel, To Paradise, in 2022. I will read it. Eventually.

First published 2013 by Doubleday.

Source: birthday present from my brother.