Portrait of New Zealand Marc Hudson (bio) The Naturalist by Thom Conroy (Random House, New Zealand, 2014. 380 pages. $39.99 pb) When I began this novel in advance of a reading at Wabash College by its author, I assumed Thom Conroy was a native New Zealander. I made this assumption on the basis of its subject matter—the life of a mid-nineteenth-century German naturalist who had accompanied a British expedition to New Zealand for the acquisition of land and knowledge of the islands’ natural resources. It seemed a good companion to the previous year’s Booker Prize winner by Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries, though markedly less bulky. Instead of a myth wrapped in the signs of the Zodiac and a murder mystery among the placer mines and frontier towns of 1860s New Zealand, The Naturalist takes us back a generation further to the founding of New Zealand—that is, the purchase of the islands by the vanguard of the New Zealand Company. The British spellings contributed to my assumption, as did the narrative voice of the novel—rather leisurely and somewhat formal and Victorian. But I was mistaken: Thom Conroy hails from Pennsylvania and did his graduate work in Oklahoma and Ohio. Conroy is an expatriate, like the German naturalist Ernst Dieffenbach, who is the novel’s protagonist. Dieffenbach, we learn, spends much of his adult life in exile. As a young anarchist, he takes part in an absurd failed revolution—an arsenal seized, three soldiers killed—but, without a populace grateful to have been liberated, defenders of the Hessian monarchy recapture the arsenal and the young anarchists who were not captured are on the run. Dieffenbach escapes to Geneva, where he gains a medical degree and knowledge of natural history, then a second idealistic gesture sends him packing to England and his eventual securing of the post of ship’s naturalist for the good ship Tory bound for New Zealand in the spring of 1839. All this is confirmed by Dieffenbach’s actual biography. Dieffenbach provides the lens through which we see New Zealand on the eve of European settlement. While his duty for the New Zealand Company appears to be the compilation of an inventory of the flora and fauna of New Zealand, Dieffenbach provides the novelist with the means to describe not only the land and its creatures, but the efforts of the company officials, a Colonel Wakefield and his entourage of soldiers, roustabouts, and surveyors, to acquire land through the trade of European goods, especially muskets, and through circumspect chicanery. Conroy has a gift for providing panoramic views of land and sea, evoking a capacious sense of space and light and a worshipful admiration of the land. But what he is most interested in exploring and imagining are the fraught relations between the Maori and the British. The British are not presented without empathy and a variety of perspectives, but there is never any doubt in the mind of Colonel Wakefield that the Maori [End Page xlv] are, at best, savages in need of the gifts of civilization, and, at worst, an inconvenience to be dealt with as brusquely as possible. Dieffenbach, a former anarchist and now a naturalist who views all members of the human species as equals, sees with more and more disquiet his untenable moral position. Climbing Mt. Egmont, he pauses at the summit to drink in the view: “The uncertainty he had felt regarding the future of the land dropped away. On the peak of Mt. Egmont, the menace of colonization struck him with sudden clarity. ‘These forests . . .’ Ernst said, turning to his companion, ‘in a generation the view will be farmland, cities, roads, cotton mills.’” For their part, caught in a sense of the unchanging constancy of sea and land and sun and moon, the Maori simply cannot imagine the thousands of settlers who will displace them. Though his sympathies lie with them, Dieffenbach can hardly ruffle the placid arrogance of Wakefield and his men. Through his troubled gaze we watch the tragedy unfold slowly but implacably as a glacier. The book is intriguingly constructed, with the narrative shuttling back and forth in space and time between lengthy...