GALAPAGOS REGAINED

Following in Darwin’s footsteps, an actress leads an expedition to Galapagos.

Morrow’s picaresque novel, set circa 1850, is intended to be rollicking but ends up simply tedious. Chloe Bathurst, who specializes in ingénue roles in some of London’s most lurid melodramas, loses her employ through a comic series of events and, by an even quirkier twist, is hired by Charles Darwin as a zookeeper to live specimens he brought back to England. When Chloe learns of the Shelley Prize, whereby the late poet’s followers will award a large sum to whomever can prove the existence—or not—of God, she swipes a précis of Darwin’s longer treatise on evolution and, through yet another improbable turn, is commissioned by the Shelley Society to head for Galapagos to prove Darwin’s theories (which she has misrepresented as her own). In her party are her cardsharp twin brother, Algernon, an episcopal cleric, Chadwick, a rakish ex-pirate, Dartworthy, a dissolute sea captain, etc.; almost as if one of her melodramas had been transposed to the high seas. After being shipwrecked, Chloe’s expedition finds itself on a barge in the Amazon jungle, where it suffers attrition thanks to piranhas and an anaconda snake. After a bout of malaria, Chloe gets religion and almost abandons her quest, but then Chadwick informs her that a rival church-sponsored expedition is on its way to the Galapagos to exterminate every tortoise, lizard and iguana. Occasionally Morrow cuts away to that expedition’s progress and also to another candidate for the prize who is traveling the Middle East in search of Noah’s Ark. When Chloe and her crew get bogged down in the Peruvian rubber wars, despite their noble aims of rescuing natives enslaved on the latex plantations, readers too may be tempted to abandon the quest. 

Prolix and period-appropriate language lends humor and an arch, Thackeray-esque tone but palls after hundreds of pages wherein the plot flags and the characters never truly reveal themselves.