from NYTIMES.COM
Books on Science
A Similar Terrain for Ants and Men
By NICHOLAS WADE
ANTHILL: A NOVEL
E. O. Wilson Norton, $24.95. 378 pages
As a former jockey, Dick Francis set all his novels at the racetrack, so it may not be surprising that the biologist Edward O. Wilson has made his newly published first novel revolve around an arena he is familiar with, that of ants. The novel is even called “Anthill,” though the title also refers to busy milling about of the human kind.
To make ants a central player in a work of fiction is decidedly a challenge. While the manuscript was in progress, a certain degree of tension arose between Dr. Wilson, who saw a starring role for the ants, and his editor, Robert Weil, who regarded a minuscule part as more appropriate. As evident from the title, Dr. Wilson seems to have prevailed. And he has contrived a deft solution for combining the affairs of ants and men.
“Anthill” is an enjoyable read, and not didactic. But it does have a philosophical premise, which is that there are grand cycles in nature, whether of ants, or people or the biosphere. Because of differences in scale, we are seldom aware of events in the microworld beneath our feet, or of the stately motions of the biosphere that are barely visible in a lifetime.
The story is told through the eyes of Raphael Cody Semmes, known as Raff, who grows up near the Nokobee, a riverine wilderness in southern Alabama, becomes a naturalist and vows to keep developers from paving over the place.
Raff’s career bears an unmistakable resemblance to that of the author, who was also born in Alabama. When Raff goes to Harvard, he is amazed at the confrontational behavior of its radical environmentalists, so inimical to Southern culture, just as Dr. Wilson was when attacked by left-leaning Harvard colleagues over his book “Sociobiology.” Raff’s girlfriend at Harvard, the reader is dryly told, “settled as far to the political left as possible without seeming to be insane — even by the relaxed clinical standards of Harvard.”
Raff’s strategy for saving the Nokobee wilderness is so far the opposite of confrontational that the author here seems to be offering a little tactical advice to the environmental movement. Raff goes to work for the developer who has the Nokobee in his sights, joins the National Rifle Association and seeks to frame a compromise from within.
But what of the ants? They are confined to a self-contained novella placed between Raff’s coming of age and his plan as an adult to save the Nokobee. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be reincarnated as an ant, this is probably the best description available. Dr. Wilson tells the sanguinary history of a protracted civil war between rival ant colonies to dominate the Nokobee. He describes the strategy and tactics of each colony as its queen, soldiers and workers struggle to prevail. Ants are nature’s other masters of social behavior, and it is easy to see in their vicious civil wars a reflection of human strife.
The Nokobee’s city-states pour their efforts into survival, seeking to conquer the territory from which to gather extra food and nourish their queen and her offspring. But they are not really masters of their fate. Their success or failure is often determined by events outside their knowledge and control, like genetic mutations, flood or drought, or the mysterious shadows that occasionally cross their nest from what seem to be moving, two-legged trees. Human societies, too, the author suggests, are busy anthills, whose members spare no effort to survive on the only scale they are aware of, yet whose fate is determined, on a quite different plane, by the forces that shape the biosphere.
“In time he understood,” Dr. Wilson writes of Raff, “that Nature was not something outside the human world. The reverse is true. Nature is the real world, and humanity exists on islands within it.”
Books on Science
A Similar Terrain for Ants and Men
By NICHOLAS WADE
ANTHILL: A NOVEL
E. O. Wilson Norton, $24.95. 378 pages
As a former jockey, Dick Francis set all his novels at the racetrack, so it may not be surprising that the biologist Edward O. Wilson has made his newly published first novel revolve around an arena he is familiar with, that of ants. The novel is even called “Anthill,” though the title also refers to busy milling about of the human kind.
To make ants a central player in a work of fiction is decidedly a challenge. While the manuscript was in progress, a certain degree of tension arose between Dr. Wilson, who saw a starring role for the ants, and his editor, Robert Weil, who regarded a minuscule part as more appropriate. As evident from the title, Dr. Wilson seems to have prevailed. And he has contrived a deft solution for combining the affairs of ants and men.
“Anthill” is an enjoyable read, and not didactic. But it does have a philosophical premise, which is that there are grand cycles in nature, whether of ants, or people or the biosphere. Because of differences in scale, we are seldom aware of events in the microworld beneath our feet, or of the stately motions of the biosphere that are barely visible in a lifetime.
The story is told through the eyes of Raphael Cody Semmes, known as Raff, who grows up near the Nokobee, a riverine wilderness in southern Alabama, becomes a naturalist and vows to keep developers from paving over the place.
Raff’s career bears an unmistakable resemblance to that of the author, who was also born in Alabama. When Raff goes to Harvard, he is amazed at the confrontational behavior of its radical environmentalists, so inimical to Southern culture, just as Dr. Wilson was when attacked by left-leaning Harvard colleagues over his book “Sociobiology.” Raff’s girlfriend at Harvard, the reader is dryly told, “settled as far to the political left as possible without seeming to be insane — even by the relaxed clinical standards of Harvard.”
Raff’s strategy for saving the Nokobee wilderness is so far the opposite of confrontational that the author here seems to be offering a little tactical advice to the environmental movement. Raff goes to work for the developer who has the Nokobee in his sights, joins the National Rifle Association and seeks to frame a compromise from within.
But what of the ants? They are confined to a self-contained novella placed between Raff’s coming of age and his plan as an adult to save the Nokobee. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be reincarnated as an ant, this is probably the best description available. Dr. Wilson tells the sanguinary history of a protracted civil war between rival ant colonies to dominate the Nokobee. He describes the strategy and tactics of each colony as its queen, soldiers and workers struggle to prevail. Ants are nature’s other masters of social behavior, and it is easy to see in their vicious civil wars a reflection of human strife.
The Nokobee’s city-states pour their efforts into survival, seeking to conquer the territory from which to gather extra food and nourish their queen and her offspring. But they are not really masters of their fate. Their success or failure is often determined by events outside their knowledge and control, like genetic mutations, flood or drought, or the mysterious shadows that occasionally cross their nest from what seem to be moving, two-legged trees. Human societies, too, the author suggests, are busy anthills, whose members spare no effort to survive on the only scale they are aware of, yet whose fate is determined, on a quite different plane, by the forces that shape the biosphere.
“In time he understood,” Dr. Wilson writes of Raff, “that Nature was not something outside the human world. The reverse is true. Nature is the real world, and humanity exists on islands within it.”
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