Servants of the Map

I discovered Andrea Barrett when I read Voyage of the Narwhal, an epic story of courage, devotion, and the struggle with the northern latitudes that captured so many imaginations during the 19th century. I enjoyed that book tremendously. I wasn't disappointed in this collection of short stories.Andrea Barrett has a great ability when it comes to developing characters. From Max Vigne, a hard working member of a mapping expedition in the area of Northern India in the title story, Servant of the Map" to his wife Clara that makes a major appearance in the final story "The Cure", all her characters are real. Almost real enough, it seems, to reach out and touch.Each story stands on its own. But the way Ms Barrett weaves the stories together if fabulous. The final story, by the way, is connected to her book, Voyage of the Narwhal. Ned Kynd, an inn keeper in the "The Cure" played a major role in the novel.I think readers appreciate these connections with past reads. It shows that the author respects the intelligence of the reader and isn't afraid to say that perhaps that story wasn't quite finished.Finally, Barrett is a wonderful story teller. One can read along in any of these stories and almost take for granted what one is reading. Then all of a sudden a major twist in the story, or some new development with the character, or a connection with something you've read before.Read this book.

Spanning 200 years, the stories of Servants of the Map, address issues of personal discovery against a backdrop of the scientific and natural world. Barrett is strongest with her historical settings, where time moves more slowly and there is more solitary introspection. We can better hear the poetic expression of quietly falling snow or the wind in the trees. Yet the strongest statement the book makes, including the contemporary stories, is the almost invisible thread that binds the characters to each other and to history. Diaries, letters, old notebooks, and old memories amplify the connections. Whether it is Max , the 1861 surveyor of the Himalayas or his wife Clara many years later in another story in America, two sisters with two different lives in two different stories, and the same for a separated brother and sister, the search for identity and the yearning for a life that matters and that is authentic is universal. Nor does Barrett stop there. For example, the last story, The Cure, brings back Nora from the haunting title story of her last collection, Ship Fever, and also refers obliquely to characters from her novel, The Voyage of the Narwhal. This new collection is an eloquent companion to those earlier works. After reading the stories, you feel like you have shared in a personal meditation with these characters.

This is a brilliantly written collection of stories that seamlessly meshes fact with fiction, science with love and faith, and the pursuit of exploration and discovery with the satisfaction of the simpler life. There are so many interesting insights into the emotions of her created characters that we wonder if there is any parallel with the lives of real adventurers.The opening title story of SERVANTS OF THE MAP starts us off well. The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India begun in the mid 19th century was a grand exercise of mapping the sub-continent. The map contours of interest were the peaks and valleys of the "still to be named" mountains of northern India. We meet Max Vignes, a draughtsman who when not sketching the details of what would later be the Himalayas, was looking down and passionately observing plants, leaves, and lichen. Max is obsessed with botany and the real mapping done by Barrett is of the contours of Max's heart. We see him torn between his love for his wife Clare and his two daughters and his all consuming scientific enthrallment with plants. This is just the first story and yet Barrett's technique of interweaving the real and the imagined, and her theme of scientific enquiry juxtaposed against the demands of the human heart, are both already fully developed and flowering. She goes on to explore this some more with "Two Rivers" where academically inclined Samuel seeks to disprove all non-theological explanations for fossils. We are transported to the world of emerging Darwinism and Barrett uses Samuel to investigate the inner difficulty of reconciling oneself to change and adapting to a new world-view. It's an issue that has as much resonance today as it did in Samuel's world of 100 years ago.Other stories where this inner geography is explored are "Theories of Rain" and "The Forest" and some of the colorful characters are Aunt's Daphne and Jane, Bianca Marburg, and Nora Kynd who appears in the last story "The Cure". Max, Clare and their daughter Elizabeth also make a return. In a fitting summation to the book Clare shows her ambivalence to Max's return. It's a perfect illustration of the truth that with the human heart there will always be undiscovered territory. "I do love him," she says. "Or I did - how can I know what I feel anymore..." This is my first book by Barrett but I've already begun what I can only hope is an equally enjoyable journey with another one.

Sometimes there are different degrees of good. For Servants of the Map, five stars doesn't seem to do it justice. In fact, using any sort of rating system doesn't feel right. This collection of stories is as fresh and clean as the outdoor worlds it so amazingly describes. Often, I found my mind wandering off the page, and rather than stop myself and turn back to the book, I let my thoughts linger on. The book is nostalgic in this way. It reads quietly and naturally. I felt myself living in Andrea Barrett's vivid landscapes, and communicating with her eccentrically human characters. How rarley in a book do you find two characters, both very likeable, dislike each other? Yet, how often do we find this in real life?In the second story, The Forest, as well as its companion, The Mysteries of Ubiquitin, opposing characters are quietly clashing almost all the time. Imagine two people, polar opposites, totally disgrunteled with each other, sitting comfortably on a patio near a swimming pool. I can not recommend this book more emphatically. For those of you who are scared of short stories... stop, and read this book. In those blank spaces between the stories, a larger more wonderous world is created than in most novels I've recently read, including those busting over the 1000 page barrier. This one, you'll want to reread simply to give your imagination another Andrea Barret boost!

Andrea Barrett has done it again. This collection of short stories has all the characteristics that placed Ship Fever and Voyage of the Narwhale among the most accomplished fictions of our time. The lucid and lovely prose, the ruthless honesty, the shocking psychological insight, compassion and deep research of the earlier works is here, but Ms Barrett continues to grow as a writer. These new stories are her most assured, most daring and most wonderfully realized yet. I have followed Ms Barrett's fiction from Lucid Stars, her first novel, to Servants of the Map with growing admiration and wonder. She is a major talent and this is a lovely book.