The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanigahara Review

Dr Abraham Norton Perina writes his memoirs from a prison cell where he’s convicted of child molestation - and yet he was once a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. What did he win it for? He found the secret to eternal life on a Micronesian island where the people consumed sacred turtle meat. But living forever comes with a terrible cost…

I really liked Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life so I was keen to try out her debut novel, The People in the Trees, whose premise intrigued me, not least because it was based on the shocking real life of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who, later in life, became a convicted paedophile.

And for about the first third of the novel, The People in the Trees is pretty good. Slow-moving, but that’s Yanagihara’s style and I respect that. But then the story stagnates once Perina discovers the Dreamers, the fabled group of islanders who have achieved eternal life, without ever recovering.

I’m not sure if parts of the review that follows warrants a spoiler warning given the above, but maybe some people might read this and wonder if he really did the things he was convicted of so I guess I’ll say SPOILERS for the rest of the review if you’re thinking of reading this - though obviously I’m not recommending it.

The problem is that we already know the sacred turtle meat prolongs life, but at a terrible cost, so we have to wait for Perina to find out, which is slow and tedious. Worse, we have to wait for him to steal a turtle and make it back to America, to test it properly and, yes, confirm the turtle meat gives you eternal life, at a terrible cost, and then wait for other scientists to test it and make the same discovery. Jeepers, it’s such a drawn-out, dreary narrative.

The other major problem is that the novel is presented as a nonfiction anthropological memoir - and, unfortunately, it convincingly reads like one too. Which is fine if you want to read a nonfiction anthropological memoir but I wanted to read a novel and hated all the academic footnotes that rarely added anything to the narrative, and the plodding pace, because memoirs don’t need to think about pacing, etc. and the pedantic repetition of events.

And then Yanagihara makes a really stupid and contrived novelistic choice right at the end. The book is mostly written in the first person of Perina, who takes the approach of a man wronged, despite being a convicted child rapist, and is careful not to talk about anything related to his conviction - for the most part anyway.

After witnessing a ritual on the island where the men of the village take turns raping a young boy in a warped coming-of-age ceremony (this author seems oddly fixated on young boys getting raped - it’s a feature of A Little Life too), Perina mentions meeting the boy later on in the forest, alluding to having sex with him without ever saying it. He’s very careful in his description of this scene.

So it makes no sense that he would write so explicitly about assaulting one of his many adopted children in his memoir. Never mind that his bizarrely and conveniently subservient acolyte Ronald Kubodera excises this section (which of course gets included right at the end because this is a novel when it wants to be), which is an obvious choice, but I didn’t understand why Perina would write it in the first place. It doesn’t fit in with the character’s motivations and the way it’s placed at the end like that is nothing but contrived and clumsy, underlining that Yanagihara, for all her talents, really didn’t know how to get into the mind of a brilliant scientist who also had this extremely dark side.

The sections on Perina’s children weren’t interesting, nor were the experiments he described, and what happened to the indigenous people of these islands following Western intervention required no imagination and was sadly predictable.

Despite the novel being pretty decent for the first third, the rest of it is too damn boring to recommend it. I found it quite a struggle to get to the end and I was glad when I got there, though I don’t think it was worth it. The People in the Trees is certainly no A Little Life and, having tried and given up on To Paradise as well, I’d say Yanagihara is, disappointingly, a one-hit wonder.