Euphoria

Chapter 2 is written in the first person from Andrew Bankson’s point of view. Depressed, alone, and traumatized by memories of his brother John, who was killed in the First World War, and his brother Martin, who shot himself in the ear, Andrew tries to drown himself by weighing down his pockets with stones. A group of Kiona natives rescues him. He decides that as he is going to be alive for Christmas, he will go to the Government Station at the Angoram Club.

Andrew meets Fen and Nell at the party and finds it surprising that Fen, who he knew and disliked from England, married Nell Stone. Given that Nell has written about the sexual escapades of the Solomon Islands, he imagines that she will be matronly; however, he finds her “nearly a girl, with thin arms and a thick plait down her back” (20). Feeling desperate for company, Andrew does everything in his power to make Fen and Nell stay with him; however, there is a tendency amongst his fellow anthropologists for “everyone want[ing] to stake out his own territory” (21).

He persuades Nell and Fen to accompany him by saying he has provisions to heal Nell’s lesions and that there are plenty of nearby tribes to study. On hearing this, the Nell and Fen collect their things and accompany Andrew on his canoe towards Nengai.

Andrew hails from a family of scientists. His father was a zoologist who hoped to build on Darwin’s theory of genetics. Andrew, at 27, arrives in New Guinea in 1931:

[M]y mother and I were the only remaining members of our family, and she had become a great psychological burden to me, both needy and despotic, a tyrant who seemed not to know what she wanted for or from her last remaining subject (27).

Of Andrew’s siblings, John showed the greatest scientific promise. However, he died in the First World War, when Andrew was only 12 and at boarding school. Andrew felt that on starting at Cambridge, “[he] had to be made for science” (32). However, once at the school, Andrew meets A. C. Haddon, a Cambridge don, and ends up working in “a nascent, barely twenty-year-old social science” (33): anthropology. The field is transitioning from the study of ancient civilizations to that of “living people” (33) in non-Western societies. Andrew takes the opportunity to escape Cambridge and his overbearing, disapproving mother by going to New Guinea. He moves to the island of New Britain, where he studies the Baining tribe. His first mission there is disappointing, and he discovers little from the tribe. On his way home, Andrew goes to Sydney, where he earns Haddon’s admiration for being “the first person to ever admit to having limitations as an anthropologist” (34).

At the end of the semester, Andrew travels to the Sepik River. While he is initially told the place is too dangerous for him, he becomes “quite taken” (34) with the Kiona tribe. He returns to England and finds it unbearable, so he rushes back to the Kiona.

On the canoe trip to Andrew’s house, Nell falls asleep. Fen asks questions, including whether Andrew still has Haddon’s butterfly net, but Andrew has forgotten about this matter. Fen tells Andrew that they had to leave the Mumbanyo because Nell was uninspired by them. She makes the decisions because they are in New Guinea on her grant money. He asks Andrew whether the Kiona “have a sacred object, removed from the village, something that they feed and protect” (39). Andrew is not aware of such an object.

Nell is animated when they arrive at Andrew’s house, a dwelling “built around a rainbow gum tree, which came up through the floor and went out the roof” (41). She advises Andrew about a local conflict, saying that because a white man killed a native, he, as a fellow white man, needs to make amends to the boy’s mother. Fen chastises Nell’s intrusiveness, but Andrew is grateful for the influx of new ideas.

Fen falls asleep, and Andrew tends to Nell’s wounds. Nell confesses that she has an “aversion” (46) to the Mumbanyo tribe, who, fueled by superstition, toss their newborns and twins into the river. The fathers also have sex with the daughters when they reach their 7th or 8th birthday. Fen, on the other hand, was “utterly compelled” (47) by the barbaric culture. It was Nell’s decision to leave.

Andrew tells Nell of his family woes and explains that Martin committed suicide because a girl he loved rejected him. He reveals that he is financially dependent on his mother, as Britain does not offer grants like the United States. His mom holds the purse-strings and threatens to cut him off. They talk about anthropology, and Andrew wonders how “we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilization, right and wrong” (50) could ever make sense of another culture.

Nell tells Andrew that she and Fen met when she was on a ship returning from the Solomons. He charmed her with his imitation of the Dobu tribe he had been studying by “putting spells and hexes” (53) on the ships’ passengers. She found Fen’s “us-against-the-world mentality […] very alluring at first” (53), and they married a year later and came to New Guinea. Andrew and Nell talk until they are exhausted, making “perfect sense” (57) to one another.

Andrew furnishes Nell with his brother Martin’s old glasses. Andrew’s informant, Ragwa, who normally takes him to tribal ceremonies, cannot accompany him today because his wife has prematurely gone into labor. Nell offers to help, but there is a taboo on a childless woman assisting at a birth. Andrew is conscious of looking after Nell, making sure that she gets enough to eat. He finds it upsetting to think that she and Fen “belonged to each other and they would go off again and leave [him] behind” (66) one day. He becomes reliant on Nell’s company, especially for his mental health. Despite having “hundreds of pages of notes” (67), Andrew is no closer to understanding the tribe.

Nell reveals that following the publication of her book on “the sex lives of native children” (69), she has not been on good terms with her parents. Andrew has not read the book because it was not well-received in England.

The next day, the trio set off on a boat down the river. The Wokup tribe are on the beach to send them off as Andrew delivers the couple to their home on Lake Tam.

In 1938, at a conference on Eugenics, Andrew meets Helen Benjamin, a woman who hands him a booklet made by Nell. Nell produced these notebooks for all her trips, but this one documents the time she spent with Andrew in New Guinea. Her notes indicate that she wanted to write about Andrew, “but felt [she] shouldn’t” (75), so she writes to Helen and does not mention him in her letter. Still, she mentions that he is a rare specimen of “height & sensitivity” (76). She writes about the challenge of learning her third language in 18 months and that “winning over” (77) a group of enthusiastic Tam children has been central to this endeavor.

There is mention of an “informant battle” (78) between Nell and Fen, and the notion that he will eventually want to make use of anyone with whom she has befriended. She tries to remain busy: “Every now and then, if I am not careful, I think of [Andrew] patching me up that first night and everything goes wobbly inside me for a few seconds” (79). She is grateful that he has not returned as soon as promised because she would not know how to handle her feelings.

Andrew writes home to his mother, keen to assure her that his “work had value and was swiftly moving in the right direction” (81), and that he wants to be at home with her in Grantchester. He is also careful to not mention Nell, though “[his] mind was stuck in conversation with her and the feeling of talking to her rang through [him], disturbed [him], woke [him] up as one wakes from sudden illness in the middle of the night” (84). He reads her book The Children of the Kirakira and finds it exhilarating because it is unacademic, written “with an urgency most of us felt but did not have enough courage to reveal, because we were too beholden to the traditions of the old sciences” (84). Andrew finds himself craving to set across Lake Tam to find the couple, who has “chased away [his] thoughts of suicide” and left him with “fierce desires” (86).

Chapter 9 takes the format of Nell’s notebook. She has befriended the Tam children and learned some Tam words. She receives a letter from Helen, with whom she once had a relationship. Helen left her partner Stanley for Nell, around the same time that Nell chose Fen over Helen. Helen warns Nell that she will always be the one who loves more in her relationship with Fen. The memory of the conflict over Helen and Fen disturbs Nell, and she later dreams of it.

Nell and Fen miss Andrew, who has been away for five weeks. Nell wonders if “we were probably too much for him with our bickering & our whining” (89). The couple’s relations are better now that her period is four days late and there is the promise of a child. However, the pregnancy turns out to be a false alarm. The childbirth of Sali, a Tam woman that Nell assists, ends tragically when her baby starves to death.

Chapter 10 features third-person narration from Nell’s perspective. Nell is disturbed by the 23 dead babies she has encountered during her research; 24, including her own. Fen says it is not his fault that Nell is not pregnant, but “[t]he lie of it hung between them” (100), suggesting that Fen has something to do with her inability to conceive. Fen is different from Nell and Andrew, who are academic. Unlike Nell, who writes books, “Fen didn’t want to study the natives; he wanted to be a native” (106) in the way he lived and behaved.

Nell’s book The Children of Kirakira is controversial for its description of childrearing. Most controversial is the description of how adolescents had a habit of “disappearing into the forest or down onto the beach with a lover of either sex at age thirteen” (107). In her current grant proposal, Nell claims that she would continue to research child development in primitive cultures, but amongst the Tam, there is the more “enticing” (108) topic of the emphasis on female sexual satisfaction during copulation. When she goes to the women’s road, she spots Malun looking “high on something […] her pupils […] dilated” (110). The women start laughing when Nell leaves.