Law of the Jungle

Werner Herzog’s documentary, Grizzly Man (2005), tells the story of Timothy Treadwell, a exuberant man-child with no formal training in wildlife who, nevertheless, spent 13 summers in the wilderness trying to bond with grizzly bears. In the end, he is eaten by one of them. There is a point in the film when Sam Egli, a helicopter pilot who helped to clean up the site of the tragedy, is interviewed. “[Treadwell] got what he deserved in my opinion.” Egli says with barely veiled contempt. “He thought…they would bond as children of the universe…I think that he had lost sight of what was really going on.” There were, apparently, many others who shared this opinion, according to the film.

I thought of this while reading Fiona McFarlane’s beautiful and disturbing debut novel, The Night Guest, but I wasn’t sure why at first. Ruth, the main character, is nothing like Timothy Treadwell. She is elderly, widowed and lives alone in an isolated beach house on the coast of Sydney. She has two grown sons who worry about her but who are too busy with their own families to visit much. She stares at the waves outside, she stares at the walls. She is kind-hearted, vulnerable and blameless as a baby bird. So why did I think of Treadwell? Ruth is, and has always been, out of touch with the world; she doesn’t understand, or even try to understand, the forces at work in it, and this leads to tragedy. But, unlike Treadwell, we don’t fault her for it. We fault the environment, the society that has produced her, the society that has produced us. What happened to her could easily happen to any one of our grandmas. By the novel’s end, we see the author is sending a warning; she is telling us to wake up, to take nothing for granted, to view the world with clear eyes, to stop being so dumb.

Through a 3rd person narration that tracks Ruth’s viewpoint very closely, we journey into Ruth’s memories. Ruth has lived in a bubble of privilege her whole life. Raised in post-war, colonial Fiji, her parents were white, Christian missionaries (her father, a doctor, her mother, a nurse) who were part of a protected elite. In Fiji, she was “repeatedly told that she was part of a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a people belonging to God.” It was, to Ruth, “a strangely urgent life, in which her father must heal the sick and save their souls.” Richard Porter, a dashing young doctor, arrived in Fiji to help her father and Ruth fell in love with him. He is considered by everyone to be “gifted” but “misguided” for befriending “the wrong Fijians (‘agitators,’ Ruth’s father called them).” Well-read, politically alert, opinionated, Richard intimidated Ruth. “She didn’t have opinions, if what he had were opinions; only preferences, and these were often vague.” Of the colonial unrest in Fiji, she noticed little of it. Fiji, to her, had always been a “strange, safe place.”

Richard ended up marrying a Japanese woman which scandalized their Christian community. Ruth, broken-hearted, moved on by leaving Fiji and settling in Sydney. She met and married Harry, a solicitor, had two sons, worked as an elocution teacher, teaching rounded vowels to “the children of sugar-company executives, engineers, missionaries, and government officials: the children of the Empire.” Now she is 75. Harry has been dead for 5 years and, since then, nothing “of consequence” has happened to Ruth, we are told. But then something happens—Ruth is visited in the night by a tiger, or what she believes to be a tiger. She hears noises in her house at night that suggest “the panting and breathing of a large animal.” We are not sure what the tiger means. Is it a daydream? Is it the onset of dementia? Whatever it is, it presages the arrival of Frida, a woman...