The People in the Trees

“And Norton is, by their choice, no longer theirs: their near-mass abandonment of him during his recent hardships was nothing less than shocking. This was the man, after all, who had given them shelter, language, education—all the tools they needed to one day betray him, as indeed they did. Norton’s children learned the message of the West, and America, all too well; somewhere they learned that accusations of perversity are an easy sell, accusations that not even a Nobel Prize, a respected mind, could successfully withstand. It is a great pity; I had been fond of quite a few of them.”

In this excerpt, Dr. Kubodera expresses his disappointment in Norton’s children for not standing by their adoptive father. Dr. Kubodera’s opinion comes from a sense of white saviorism, in which he believes that Norton’s children should support the man regardless of what he may or may not have done, simply because he saved them from the poverty of U’ivu.

“We treated her like most boys would treat small animals: kindly when we were feeling happy and generous, cruelly when we were not. It was intoxicating to know we had the power to make her shoulders relax, to make her lips part in an uncertain smile, and yet also to make her turn her face down, to make her rub her palm quickly against her leg, which she did when she was nervous or unhappy or confused.”

Norton and Owen treat their mother terribly, seeing her as someone to be played with and manipulated, rather than as a parent to be respected. The lack of support they receive from their parents has a great influence on their adult lives, but the ease with which they gaslight their mother foreshadows Norton’s own easy manipulation of others later in the novel.

“I was not surprised, and had expected little from him—not simply because he was a minister, but because he looked so diminished. He had the sort of face that was memorable for its absences rather than its presences: cheeks so gaunt and cadaverous that it looked as if someone had reached in, scooped out the meat in two quick movements, and sent him on his way.”

Norton has a tendency throughout the novel to dehumanize others and focus solely on their physical features when describing them or criticizing them. In this instance, he cannot move past the face of the minister, haunted by its gauntness. He also makes a connection between how he sees the minister as a person and how it connects to his physical appearance, a practice that will follow him throughout his life.

“But as it was, I had to defy the burdens not of poverty but of a contentedly and determinedly unkinetic father and a comfortable childhood—one I might have enjoyed were I not so set upon denying it.”

Norton creates a conflict for himself as a child, seeing his father’s aloofness and his relative ease as detriments to his character. He comes to despise his father’s attitude toward life and doesn’t appreciate the situation he lives in. This formative moment drives him to seek adventure as an adult, instilled with a sense of always needing to do something meaningful within the larger world.

But now I almost admire Owen’s indecisiveness; it was almost as if he, to make up for my singlemindedness, was trying to be of as many minds as possible. I was impatient then, of course, but now I can recall fondly my brother’s prickliness, his fierce idealism, his quickly burning passions. I remember Owen in those days as so vital, so indefatigable, so intellectually nimble in ways I was not.”

Throughout the novel, in his limited appearances and references, Owen becomes Norton’s foil. He lives a life wholly different from Norton, studying and teaching poetry, living openly as a gay man and caring for Norton’s children in a way that Norton cannot. Norton feels a strong connection to Owen, and as twins, sees him as his other half, completing his missing parts.

“(I’m simplifying, but not by much; this is really how they thought at the time, not just in medicine but in all sciences: you make a bomb; you drop it on a troublesome people; the troublesome people are no more.)”

This reference to the atomic bomb captures a greater trend in the novel: the dehumanization of people who are deemed to be an obstacle to progress. The larger scientific community sees the Ivu’ivuans and U’ivuans as an obstacle to accessing immortality; likewise, they do their best to first earn favor with the king and then with the people to gain access to their resources. They cast the U’ivuans aside, never to return to finish the development of the islands or help restore the ravaged environment to its former state.

“But although I had not enough experience in the world to prove this, I suspected even then that the strangest details were the most mundane, and that what we tell others to shock will only inure them to realizing what is truly remarkable. And in this perception I was not to be proven wrong.”

Norton describes his outlook of the world and his own view of U’ivu. He sees it as an unknown nation, and while much of the information he finds is shocking to him, he also believes that the more unusual details of the culture merely represents the U’ivuans’ version of normalcy. This hints at something happening beneath the surface, and that there is a different reason to turn his attention to U’ivu.

“[A]fter all the stories of their ferocity, I was surprised by their size—the tallest came just to my shoulder—and by the flat ugliness of their faces, the way their skin shone like an old grease stain, the way their lower jaws seemed to punch forward from the rest of their features. They were neither fat nor thin, although their legs were corded with stringy muscle and their thighs were enormous, the thighs of people who had spent their lives climbing up and down steep mountainsides.”

Norton’s immediate inclination upon meeting his U’ivuan guides on Ivu’ivu is to examine their physical features. He defines them by the qualities he decides are strange to him, reducing them to their physical abilities and appearances. His quick judgement based on appearance is just one of the many features of his complicated relationship with U’ivuans.

“This did not offend or alarm me. Science itself is guesses, lucky guesses, intuitive guesses, researched guesses. I had worked for people who were certain, and it had felt disquieting, and dangerous. And so I had been happy to come here (well, perhaps not happy, but certainly not worried; although Tallent had not been completely incorrect—I had been desperate as well) not knowing the full story. I suppose this sounds foolish now, unrealistic, but when you are young, planning seems less important, less essential, than it becomes when you have things to protect: money, research, a reputation.”

In this excerpt, Norton acknowledges the part that luck played in helping to develop his scientific career. Without the invitation to join Tallent’s expedition, he would never have the chance to discover the opa’ivu’eke and begin a hugely successful, Nobel Prize-winning career. Additionally, he reveals that the priorities of his adult life and family are noticeably missing.

“It was an exhausting performance that never ended, and for what? To prove the imperturbability of nature, I suppose—its unknowability, its fundamental lack of interest in humanity. Or at least that’s what it seemed like at the time: a mockery. It was absurd, I knew, to wake each day and resent the jungle and my own insignificance in it.”

In his first trip through the jungle, Norton is in awe of its power and beauty. Yet he comes to hate it for making him feel small and insignificant. As a scientist whose goal is to make a career for himself, the feeling of insignificance is in direct conflict with his narcissism and his need to be the most important and impressive person in a space.

“The problem with being young and in a singular place is that one assumes that one will inevitably find oneself in an equally foreign and exotic location at some later point in life. But this is very rarely true. For most of what we see in our immediate surroundings is in fact replicated elsewhere in the world with a sort of dull exactness: birds, animals, fruits, sky, people. They may look different from place to place, but their fundamental behaviors are essentially identical: birds tweet and flap, animals prowl and bleat, fruits are insensate and inanimate, the sky fills and empties of clouds and stars, people wear clothes and kill and eat and die.”

Norton describes the loss of imagination and wonder that occurs as one ages and discovers that the vastness of the world is in fact not that vast. He asserts that while people, places and animals may look different, they act similar and will no longer surprise those who encounter them for the first time. From this perspective, places are deemed exotic solely because of the youth and inexperience of those who behold them.

“Many years later, in Maryland, I would stand on a playground watching some of my newly arrived sons and daughters be taunted by the neighborhood children, who would scoop their hands under their arms, chasing after them and making noises like cartoon gorillas—‘Oo-oo-ah-ah! Koo-oo-ka-ah!’—and would not be able to stop myself from agreeing with their interpretations.”

Norton never fully accepts the U’ivuans as people, and his racist view of them impacts his own perception of his children. In this case, when he witnesses his children being taunted and bullied in racist ways, he finds himself agreeing with their aggressors. He sees the U’ivuans as a tool through which to achieve his own goals, not as people with their own autonomy and rights.

“By this time we were moving again, the dreamers (as I had come to think of them, for their somnambulists’ drool, their dopey half-glaze of clarity, as if they were slogging through a thick sediment of sleep) separated into three groups, bound together by their wrists with a long string of vine which was fastened to the waist of one of the guides.”

Norton reveals the origins of the group’s name as the dreamers, once again using their physical attributes in order to define them. He sees their mental fog and uncoordinated movements as those of deep sleepers who have finally awakened. He also notes that despite the group moving freely before their arrival, his group has now tied them together, confining them in order to more easily move them from place to place.

“And if one looks at that population, one sees that most of those ‘lost’ tribes are actually lost only to the white man: just because civilized society stumbles upon a group of Amazonian people does not mean that those people are unknown to dozens of other, better-documented, neighboring tribes.”

Norton recognizes that the idea of a lost tribe is a sensationalized mischaracterization, for these people are known to themselves and to others. Just because they are not well-known to the world’s most politically dominant nations does not mean that they do not exist. In the case of the Ivu’ivuans, there are rumors of their existence on U’ivu, but their discovery shows that they have their own society and do not need to be introduced to the world to make their existence meaningful.

“There was another unseen and not entirely pleasant consequence of bearing witness to these activities, which was that my dreams at night began increasingly to turn to Tallent. I am slightly ashamed to admit this, for it sounds so childish, but I was, after all, barely more than a child myself at the time. In the mornings I could not remember the specifics, only that he was in them and that I was happy, and that the days that followed often felt unbearably dreary and sad, a landscape bled of contentment, and I began to think of them as something to be withstood before I could return to the cosseting blank darkness of night.”

Norton admits to having romantic feelings for Tallent and sees a connection between his happiness and Tallent himself. Norton, who suffers from crushing loneliness, sees a possible cure for this inner affliction in Tallent and feels happiness after dreaming about him. Norton chases this feeling throughout the novel, and he is later crushed when Tallent disappears, bringing the dream of being happy in Tallent’s company to a brutal end.

“My mind immediately filled with the worst of thoughts. I saw Esme pressed against a tree, Tallent embracing her, her ugly mouth open like a greedy carp’s, the messy excessiveness of her body-her sprawling hips, her bulging stomach, her puckered, dimpling thighs, her frizzed dandelion head of hair-a repulsive foil to the trim discipline of his own form.”

As before, Norton defines the people around him by their physical qualities, and this time there is the contrast between someone he wants to be with and someone he hates. He is jealous of Esme’s closeness with Tallent and only sees her flaws, focusing on the parts of her that he deems unacceptable. Meanwhile, he sees only positive attributes in Tallent, and his own feelings toward the man push him to see Tallent in a flattering light.

“A state that led to an unnaturally long life-an immortal life. But it was a parody of immortality, because while the afflicted did in fact remain physically frozen at the age at which she had eaten the turtle, her mind did not. Bit by bit, it disintegrated—first the memory, then the social nuances, then the sense, and then finally speech—until all that was left was the body. The mind was gone, worn down by the years its fissures and byways exhausted by having to perform for far more decades than it was organically equipped to do.”

This excerpt includes Norton’s initial theory about the connection between the dreamers and the opa’ivu’eke. It posits that while the body can stop aging, the mind cannot, and therefore it decays before the body does. This separation of mind and body as two separate parts of a human is reflected in the Ivu’ivuans’ exile of mo’o kua’aus and the confiscation of their spears, as only a human can carry a spear, and once Ivu’ivuans lose their minds, they are no longer considered to be human.

“And yet a part of me understood Fa’a’s distress: now that we had entered the dreamers’ lives—now that we had named them as dreamers, now that we had cared for them, now that we considered them ours, something found and given meaning—it was somehow difficult to imagine them capable of living on without us.”

Once again, Norton is using the Ivu’ivuans for his own personal gain rather than seeking to improve their well-being. He is splitting up the self-sufficient group of dreamers so that he can study some of them in the lab. The ones he brings back immediately deteriorate, and in this moment, he realizes that he may be dooming the others by fracturing their small community.

“His spear, […] was very long, at least nine feet, and slender, swelling into a large white tip. Even from a distance I could see that the spear was elaborately carved with shapes of opa’ivu’eke’s, and its blade was etched with a series of whorls that Tallent later told me were meant to represent waves.”

Spears in U’ivuan culture represent the completion of men as whole human beings. They reflect the individual, and in this passage, the king’s spear signifies his importance to the community. The spear is big and highly detailed, and it carries the sacred imagery of the opa’ivu’eke. The care taken in its design reflects the importance of its wielder.

“Later, herpetologists would write papers detailing the species’ many unusual traits and characteristics, but all neglected to mention the one I found most appealing and singular about them, which was how they could project an almost canine friendliness combined with a feline centeredness. After eating, they padded about me for a few minutes, and when I stroked their carapaces, they did not retreat or take offense but merely shut their eyes and enjoyed it, much as their predecessor had done all those years before.”

The demeanor of the opa’ivu’ekes highlights the predatory nature of Norton’s relationship, and in a bigger sense, that of the wider world that seeks to strip the villagers’ home of its resources. The villagers are trusting, not seeing foreign visitors as a threat until the arrival of the research teams that succeed Norton’s group. While the Ivu’ivuans retain a balance with the opa’ivu’eke, Norton and other researchers hunt the turtles to extinction, using them for their own gain.

“I could see them regarding me with envy, for while they spent their days trying to develop drugs and cold creams, I was doing real work, and they knew I was their superior. And yet they had all the resources—it was clear, from my single rucksack resting in Uva’s cart, that I did not—and it was already clear that the ones who had the resources would win. This is always true in science. It was true even then. I excused myself as soon as I could.”

Norton travels past the researchers from pharmacological companies on Ivu’ivu and cannot help but think of himself as being superior to them. While they are researching in order to make cosmetic products, he is researching for the sake of discovery, not for the pursuit of marketability. And yet, he recognizes the influence of power and money on the goals of the scientific community as well.

“But the worst thing was that none of the U’ivuan men who worked for the missionaries had their spears; they had given them up to become Christians, and the sight of them without their spears was somehow obscene, as if they were missing their heads. Even the most destitute, the most unrecognizable of men in Tui’uvo kept their spears; often it was the only thing they had.”

In U’ivuan culture, a man’s spear reflects himself, and without it he is not complete. When the pharmacological companies and university research teams leave U’ivu, the missionaries come in and finally succeed in converting U’ivuans, banning their customs and fundamentally changing the way of life on U’ivu, further showing how foreign sources of exploitation negatively impact the lives of Indigenous people.

“And once again I found myself turning and looking at him. I gave you a name because you were nameless when I found you, I thought. A dog. Less than a dog. It took some effort not to say this, and had I been more perturbed, I might not have been able to stop myself.”

Whenever Norton becomes angry at his children or wishes that he could escape them, he often dehumanizes them in his mind. In this thought during an argument with Victor, Norton thinks of calling Victor a dog and reiterates that he is responsible for bringing Victor to the United States. Norton always thinks of his children through this power structure, eroding familial bonds and creating a toxic relationship.