The Devil's Garden is the third novel written by British author Edward Docx. It was published in 2011 by Picador and is a contemporary novel set on an Amazonian river station in the South American jungle.
His other novels are The Calligrapher (2003) and Self Help (2007).
The Devil’s Garden tells the story of the scientist Dr Forle, living on an Amazon River station deep in the South American jungle. He and his international crew of colleagues are working with remote tribes, studying large clearings made by ants in the forest, which they call ‘devil’s gardens’. Forle hopes the project will change the way people think about evolution and the nature of life itself. A Colonel and a Judge arrive at the river station purporting to have come to register the local Indian tribes to vote, yet on the night of their arrival Forle witnesses an act of torture against a local tribesman. Forle and his colleagues are soon caught up in a small war between the tribes, renegade soldiers and cocaine growers.
Docx has said that he began The Devil's Garden came when he first travelled in the Amazon in 2002. He visited a science station up river from Puerto Maldonado and met some scientists working on ants. He began to write the novel while he was there and finished the book once he had returned to London. [1] In an interview, [1] he states that the novel emulates the Amazonian river ‘getting deeper and darker and fuller.’ He has also said that 'it is about religion and science, about the ancient and the modern, about love and exploitation, about the clash between the individual and the powerful opposing forces that seek to determine our future'. [2]
The book has been described as Conradian fable for our time, [3] but Docx has said elsewhere that his main interests were anthropological - and that the novel is about precisely the opposite: that there is nowhere left on the globe to hide and that the possibility of a society or individual living beyond the reaches of contemporary culture has all but disappeared. [4]
Critical reception was generally favourable - many critics praising the intelligence of the novel as well as its spare style of the writing which is a mixture of prose and scientific journal entries.
In The Guardian , for example, Giles Foden wrote that Docx's third novel is ‘Full of intellectual provocations as it is of suspenseful turns’. [5]
The Independent on Sunday noted that 'This poisoned Eden throbs with intensity and delivers a gut punch that leaves you reeling'. [6] The Economist described it as 'written in punchy action-packed paragraphs.' [7]
According to The Spectator ; 'Docx is a master of disquiet... Arguably, the plot is slightly over-peopled, but they’re all portrayed with great artistry and imagination'. [8]
Several critics have noted the difference in style between Docx's works.
The Amazon rainforest, alternatively, the Amazon jungle or Amazonia, is a moist broadleaf tropical rainforest in the Amazon biome that covers most of the Amazon basin of South America. This basin encompasses 7,000,000 km2 (2,700,000 sq mi), of which 5,500,000 km2 (2,100,000 sq mi) are covered by the rainforest. This region includes territory belonging to nine nations and 3,344 formally acknowledged indigenous territories.
Amazonas is a state of Brazil, located in the North Region in the northwestern corner of the country. It is the largest Brazilian state by area and the 9th largest country subdivision in the world, and the largest in South America, being greater than the areas of Uruguay, Paraguay, and Chile combined. Mostly located in the Southern Hemisphere, it is the third largest country subdivision in the Southern Hemisphere after the Australian states of Western Australia and Queensland. Entirely in the Western Hemisphere it is the fourth largest in the Western Hemisphere after Greenland, Nunavut and Alaska. It would be the sixteenth largest country in land area, slightly larger than Mongolia. Neighbouring states are Roraima, Pará, Mato Grosso, Rondônia, and Acre. It also borders the nations of Peru, Colombia and Venezuela. This includes the Departments of Amazonas, Vaupés and Guainía in Colombia, as well as the Amazonas state in Venezuela, and the Loreto Region in Peru.
Madre de Dios is a department and region in southeastern Peru, bordering Brazil, Bolivia and the Peruvian departments of Puno, Cusco and Ucayali, in the Amazon Basin. Its capital is the city of Puerto Maldonado. It is also the third largest department in Peru, after Ucayali and Loreto. However, it is also the least densely populated department in Peru, as well as its least populous department.
The Pirahã are an indigenous people of the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil. They are the sole surviving subgroup of the Mura people, and are hunter-gatherers. They live mainly on the banks of the Maici River in Humaitá and Manicoré in the state of Amazonas. As of 2018, they number 800 individuals. The Pirahã people do not call themselves Pirahã but instead the Hi'aiti'ihi, roughly translated as "the straight ones."
Percy Harrison Fawcett was a British geographer, artillery officer, cartographer, archaeologist, and explorer of South America. Fawcett disappeared in 1925 during an expedition to find "Z"—his name for an ancient lost city which he and others believed existed in the jungles of Brazil.
The Achuar are an Amazonian community of some 18,500 individuals along either side of the border in between Ecuador and Peru. As of the early 1970s, the Achuar were one of the last of the Jivaroan groups still generally unaffected by outside contact.
Giles Foden is an English author, best known for his novel The Last King of Scotland (1998).
The Last King of Scotland is a novel by journalist Giles Foden, published by Faber and Faber in 1998. Focusing on the rise of Ugandan President Idi Amin and his reign as dictator from 1971 to 1979, the novel, which interweaves fiction and historical fact, is written as the memoir of a fictional Scottish doctor in Amin's employ. Foden's novel received critical acclaim and numerous awards when it was published. In 2006, a loose eponymous film adaptation was released.
Myrmelachista schumanni, also known as the lemon ant, is a species of ant from South America. It is notable for the creation of Devil's garden. Using its own herbicide they kill off all the plants in an area except for the myrmecophytes, or ant-plants, in which they reside.
The Munduruku, also known as Mundurucu or Wuy Jugu or BMJ, are an indigenous people of Brazil living in the Amazon River basin. Some Mundurucu communities are part of the Coatá-Laranjal Indigenous Land. They had an estimated population in 2014 of 13,755.
Edward Docx is a British writer. His first novel, The Calligrapher, was published in 2003. He is an associate editor of Prospect Magazine.
Mad White Giant: a journey to the heart of the Amazon jungle is a 1985 semi-autobiographical adventure novel by British explorer and author Benedict Allen. It details Allen's travels between the mouths of the Orinoco and the Amazon rivers. In the United States, the novel was published under the title, Who Goes Out In The Midday Sun?
The black-and-white antbird is a species of bird in the family Thamnophilidae. It is monotypic within the genus Myrmochanes. It is found in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist lowland forests and subtropical or tropical moist shrubland.
Devil's Garden is an area of Arches National Park that features a series of rock fins and arches formed by erosion.
Amazonian languages is the term used to refer to the indigenous languages of "Greater Amazonia." This area is significantly larger than the Amazon and extends from the Atlantic coast all the way to the Andes, while its southern border is usually said to be the Paraná. The region is inhabited by societies that share many cultural traits but whose languages are characterized by great diversity. There are about 330 extant languages in Greater Amazonia, almost half of which have fewer than 500 speakers. Meanwhile, only Wayuu has greater than 100,000 speakers. Of the 330 total languages, about fifty are isolates, while the remaining ones belong to about 25 different families. Most of the posited families have few members. It is this distribution of many small and historically unrelated speech communities that makes Amazonia one of the most linguistically diverse regions in the world. The precise reasons for this unusual diversity have not yet been conclusively determined, but Amazonian languages seem to have had fewer than 10,000 native speakers even before the invasion of European colonists wrought havoc on the societies by which they were spoken. Despite the large-scale diversity, the long-term contact among many of the languages of Greater Amazonia has created similarities between many neighboring languages that are not genetically related. Most indigenous Amazonian people today are bilingual or even monolingual in Spanish or Portuguese, and many Amazonian languages are endangered as a result.
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon is the debut non-fiction book by American author David Grann. The book was published in 2009 and recounts the activities of the British explorer Percy Fawcett who, in 1925, disappeared with his son in the Amazon while looking for an ancient lost city. For decades explorers and scientists have tried to find evidence of his party and of the "Lost City of Z".
The Storyteller is a novel by Peruvian author and Literature Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa. The story tells of Saúl Zuratas, a university student who leaves civilization and becomes a "storyteller" for the Machiguenga Native Americans. The novel thematizes the Westernization of indigenous peoples through missions and through anthropological studies, and questions the perceived notion that indigenous cultures are set in stone.
Amazon most often refers to:
Kenneth Good is an anthropologist most noted for his work among the Yanomami and his account of his experiences with them: Into the Heart: One Man’s Pursuit of Love and Knowledge Among the Yanomami. While researching and living with the group in Venezuela, Good married a Yanomami woman named Yarima, who emigrated to the United States with Good when he returned home. Their three children were raised in the United States, but Yarima, finding adapting to life in the United States too difficult, returned to her village when the children were young.
White Amazonian Indians or White Indians is a term first applied to sightings or encounters with mysterious white skinned natives of the Amazon Rainforest from the 16th century by Spanish missionaries. These encounters and tales sparked Percy Fawcett's journey into the uncharted jungle of the Amazonian Mato Grosso region. Various theories since the early 20th century have been proposed regarding the documented sightings or encounters.