THE WHITE MARY

A battle-worn journalist penetrates the jungles of Papua New Guinea in search of her idol, a famous war correspondent long presumed dead.

In her preface, Salak (The Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu, 2004, etc.), who recounted her own PNG adventure in the memoir Four Corners (2001), explains that she sought out Peruvian shamans to help her heal after the death of her brother. Whence her first novel’s new-agey resolution, tacked on in jarring contrast to the horrific atrocities witnessed and experienced by her reporter characters. Like Marlow in Heart of Darkness, Marika crosses an intractable wilderness, ostensibly to find the novel’s Kurtz, Robert Lewis, but her true quest is the investigation of evil. Lewis was, like Marika, a maverick war correspondent who ventured alone into the world’s most chaotic war zones. After his son was killed in Africa, Lewis left a suicide note and disappeared. Marika’s guide through the malarial swamps, infested thickets and craggy mountains of a place where indigenous life has not changed in millennia is Tobo, a tribal chieftain and witch doctor. Less than willingly, Tobo becomes the “White Mary’s” taciturn, irascible and, eventually, lovable betel-nut-chewing mentor in life, love and primitive gender politics (not so different, it appears, from civilized gender politics). Marika has almost completed her biography of Lewis when a breakup with her therapist boyfriend Seb coincides with receipt of a missionary’s letter in which Lewis claims to have been spotted in the remote mountain village of Walwasi. After an arduous trek, Tobo and Marika finally encounter not only the volatile Walwasi people, whose destinies are ruled by fire demons, but also Robert Lewis, tolerated because (in an obvious irony) the Walwasi think he’s impervious to demons.

A vivid journey too often slowed by tedious flashbacks wherein Seb urges Marika to confront her post-traumatic stress. If only Marika’s internal demons were as interesting as the external ones Tobo teaches her to surmount.