Confessing a Murder

This novel is a delightful piece of revisionist history concerning the formultion of the Theory of Natural Selection. The narrator, an old man marooned on an island in the Java sea when we meet him, claims to have given the main ideas that became the basis of Darwin's famous theory to both Darwin as a young man and, at least indirectly, to Wallace who came to the same idea about the same time. The title is a quote from Darwin who said that expounding the theory of evolution was like "confessing a murder" - a phrase that comes to have multiple meanings.The narrator is an avid naturalist and comes to be obsessed with finding a golden beetle which takes him on the quest that ends on the island. The island is populated with remarkable plants and animals. They have evolved to have traits that are realistic but just a little "over the top". There is, for example, a mistletoe that is parasitic not on trees but on nestlings that happen to be nearby. The mistletoe saps their blood but far from been detrimental to the birds, the mistletoe confirs increased immunity and parasitized birds survive and grow better than their unparasitized nestmates. This book is filled with examples that will delight anyone who has studied a little animal behavior. Drayson, who was a curator at a Natural History museum in Australia, uses his knowledge artfully and imaginatively. His imaginary species support the hypotheses of behavioral ecology and their physiology are almost - but not quite - realistic.

With Darwin's publication of the Origin of the Species in 1859, two thousand years of church doctrine--that God created the species on earth in divine acts of separate creation and that Genesis is a literal description of this creation--came into direct conflict with scientific research. Darwin, himself a theologian, was reluctant to reveal his acceptance of evolution, saying that "denial of a literal interpretation of the biblical account of creation felt like 'confessing a murder.'" This erudite and literate novel purports to be a found manuscript from an unknown author writing in 1883 from an island in the Java Sea. Telling of "Bobby" Darwin's early life and background, the speaker reveals his love for Bobby, his fascination with Bobby's explorations on the Beagle, and his influence on Bobby to accept the Theory of Evolution. The speaker, who "cannot remember ever having a God," also claims to have been the source of Alfred Russel Wallace's knowledge of The Theory. His depiction of Wallace as a self-promoting and arrogant trader of beetles and butterflies provides a bit of humor and suggests a rationale for Wallace's rush to promote his view of evolution simultaneously with that of Darwin. Alternating fast-paced personal narrative and characterization with vibrant descriptions of fascinating, largely imaginary flora and fauna on the Java Sea island (now vanished after a volcanic eruption), the speaker focuses on the interdependence of plant and animal species on each other. The gentle gadzocks eat the salty sargassum weed, misseltow feeds on the blood of noddy chicks, crabs fell trees in order to get to coconuts, and the mystical golden scarab depends on the guano of bats. These descriptions of dependence give a thought-provoking slant to the treatment of evolution, provide numerous parallels with the human relationships in the story, and stimulate the reader's imagination about possible vanished species and the need for conservation. This is a novel of huge reach, with a full-circle, religiously suggestive conclusion. Some sections are a bit pedantic, and not all readers will enjoy the alternating focus of intimate personal revelations and descriptions of nature, but the book provides much food for thought, and, perhaps, a new view of Darwin and his achievements. Mary Whipple

I just finished reading Nicholas Drayson's debut novel, 'Confessing a Murder.' The title comes from Charles Darwin's remark that the, to him, heretical religious implications of his Theory made him feel a little like he was 'confessing a murder.'The premise of the book is that it purports to be the newly discovered journal of a (fictional) early Victorian gentleman, intimately associated with Darwin's family, who is exiled to the South Pacific, and after making a fortune in trade in Australia, ultimately finds himself on an island, also fictional, near Java, where he makes discoveries that suggest what later becomes Darwin's Theory of Evolution, much of which he communicates to Darwin by letter. The journal is addressed of 'Bobby', as he has called Darwin since childhood. He is obsessed by beetles and makes observations that are fascinating in their peculiarities--he reports closely observed behavior and characteristics of beetles that bespeak Drayson's familiarity with entomology. Drayson is a former curator of the National Museum in Australia and his invented details of the peculiarities of the flora and fauna of his island, while bizarre, have their own logic and are thus pretty convincing. It's 'Origin of Species' imaginatively admixed with 'Robinson Crusoe'. There's even a murder and plenty of Darwin family intrigue.For anyone not familiar with the inner working of the Theory, there is a good deal of painless and quite clear explanation of the main points of the Theory.

This was an interesting novel. The kind that makes you pause at the last page with a thousand thoughts and questions. From the opening publisher's statement about the authenticity of the diary by the unknown narrator friend of Charles Darwin to the final incidental murder on the island, this book is as equally scientific as it is personal. The narrator's obsession with beetles - more specifically his growing search for the golden scarab - is backed up by a wide-ranging entomological expertise on a range of flora, fauna and organisms on this Galapagos equivalent near Java. From the opening gadzocks, misseltow (mistletoe), rana grantii frogs, sargassum birds, the bouncing Cocumis ciconius, to the shapehifting Chamaelio abitissimus, the narrator intersperses his scientific precision with a lazy narration of his relationships with the Darwin family, his exile from England, his love for Charley and his wealth as an antipodean trader.Ultimately the narrator is claiming that the Theory of Evolution was a natural progression of his own thought and that his expounding of it to both 'Bobby' and Charley meant the final dual publication by both Darwin and Wallace through an strange twist of events that forces Darwin's publishing hand.Confessing a murder is narrated in an almost dreamy style, truly as though a diary of reminiscence, with the narrator 'waking up' when entomology is the subject to busily observe and precisely record his findings.Certainly worth reading