This year is the 10th anniversary of the Wellcome Book Prize,which celebrates the topics of health and medicine in literature. IN celebration of this important event, a blog tour is taking place with reviewers paying tribute to two books from each year of the prize. By chance I happened to have just read State of Wonder, shortlisted for 2011. So here's my review.

The protagonist of this wonderful novel is a 42-year-old research scientist by the name of Marina Singh - her name is a clue to her origins, as she was the child of an American mother and a long departed Sikh Indian father. She works for a large pharmaceutical company in Minnesota and is having a slightly lukewarm affair with her boss, Mr Fox. Her research partner, Anders Ekerman, has recently been sent to a remote part of Brazil to investigate the progress of a groundbreaking research project which the company hopes will soon be coming to fruition. The research is led by the formidable Dr Annik Swenson, who has made a remarkable discovery:
"She found a village of people in the Amazon, a tribe,” Anders had told Marina, “where the women go on bearing children until the end of their lives. . . . Their eggs aren’t aging, do you get that? The rest of the body goes along its path to destruction while the reproductive system stays daisy fresh. This is the end of I.V.F. No more expense, no more shots that don’t end up working, no more donor eggs and surrogates. This is ovum in perpetuity, menstruation everlasting. . . . Pretend for a moment that you are a clinical pharmacologist working for a major drug development firm. Imagine someone offering you the equivalent of ‘Lost Horizon’ for American ovaries.”
Anders has been gone for some weeks, and is expected back soon, but almost as soon as the novel begins, upsetting news arrives in the form of a letter from Dr Swenson: Anders has died of a fever. Marina is deeply shocked: There was inside of her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding, as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips were all being brought together at closer angles.
Marina is given the unenviable job of informing Anders' wife of his death, an agonising task especially, perhaps, because the bereaved woman refuses to believe her husband has died and demands to know the full details. Marina is going to get the chance to find out, as her employers decide she is the person to go and complete Anders' investigations. She unwillingly starts taking a malaria drug she remembers from her childhood visits to India and which gives her horrendous nightmares. Soon she is on a flight heading to Brazil, where the moment she arrives she is overwhelmed by the difference in the climate:
The outside air was heavy enough to be bitten and chewed. Never had Marina's lungs taken in so much oxygen, so much moisture. With every inhalation she felt she was introducing unseen particles of plant life into her body, tiny spores that bedded down in between her cilia and set about taking root. An insect flew against her ear, emitting a sound so piercing that her head snapped back as if struck ... They were not in the jungle, they were in a parking lot.
After a long period of uncertainty she manages to meet Dr Swenson who very unwillingly agrees to take her back to the research centre deep in the Amazonian jungle. The journey, in a primitive motor boat, accompanied by a profoundly deaf young tribal boy named Easter, a protégé of the doctor's, takes them past the dwelling place of a tribe thought to be cannibals and eventually deposits them in the heart of the jungle where the research centre is located. Dr Swenson is cold and unwelcoming - Marina has been dreading meeting her as the doctor was once her supervisor and the two had parted on difficult terms after a serious accident - however Swenson does not seem to recall this incident or indeed Marina herself. The secret of the substance that extends childbearing is soon revealed, and Marina wonders if she should participate - she is nearing the end of her own childbearing years. It's also proved to have a secondary effect as a inoculation against malaria. Meanwhile she is pulled more and more deeply into the dreamlike quality of life in the depths of the jungle, where the tribe is unexpectedly welcoming - the women spend many hours each day combing and plaiting each others hair, and happily include her in their hair-dressing rituals.She loses her suitcase with all her clothes in it and is forced to wear native dress. And Dr Swenson is extremely unwilling to divulge the details of Anders' death or the site of his burial.
This is a brilliant, magical novel. It has obvious echoes of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and also touches of A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, but it also raises important questions about the role of large pharmaceutical companies on indigenous life. And at the centre of it all is Marina, facing her own big questions about her future, her childlessness and her career.
I've read two of Ann Patchett's novels before - Bel Canto in pre-blogging days and Commonwealth (reviewed here) and I'm longing to read more of this great novelist and am very pleased to have stumbled upon this one.