State of Wonder

Marina’s mentor, teacher, and residency supervisor at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Annick Swenson is one of the most complicated characters in the novel. A legendary biomedical researcher, her life and her career have been inextricably linked as she has spent nearly 50 years balancing her formal teaching and advisory roles at Johns Hopkins and other institutions, both academic and corporate, with her life’s passion, researching the Lakashi tribe, and their rare ecosystem. Her ability to manage both responsibilities underscores her tireless energy, and her relentless pursuit of her ambitions.

Dr. Swenson is both tireless and exceptionally brilliant, qualities that make her intolerant of fools, incompetence, and anyone who slows down or impedes her progress. These traits made her an unforgiving and challenging professor and, at least initially, these qualities make her seem obsessive and monomaniacal, insensitive, unresponsive and perhaps, in the aftermath of Anders’ disappearance, conspiratorial.

While these are our initial impressions of Dr. Swenson, the real Dr. Swenson is a much more nuanced and sympathetic human being. Her mission, to develop and distribute an anti-malarial vaccine developed from the Martin tree bark, is a noble one, and her determined attempts to protect the fragile Lakashi culture and ecosystem from exploitation offer a sympathetic counter-balance to her portrayal as a self-obsessed scientist.

When we finally meet Dr. Swenson, our initial impressions must also live alongside the sympathetic image of her as a desperately lonely woman and a good mother, surviving the loss of her mentor and the great love of her life, Dr. Martin Rapp, and raising a Hummoccan Indian boy as her own son. 

If Dr. Swenson becomes progressively more human and sympathetic in her characterization, Mr. Fox becomes decidedly less so over the course of the novel. Initially, Marina’s love for him and his overt guilt over sending an ill-equipped Anders to the Amazon make him a sympathetic figure. In addition, we learn that he lost his wife, the mother of his two daughters, prematurely to lymphoma. While these are all humanizing traits, as the novel develops, Mr. Fox, like his name, seems more and more ruthless and cunning in his relentless quest to develop and distribute the fertility drug that Dr. Swenson has promised to deliver. His unexpected arrival at the Amazon research station, a trip made at significant risk and expense, seems, at the outset, like a brave and dashing attempt to rescue his lover and employee, Marina. This is not the case, however, as Mr. Fox quickly trades her medical services in exchange for what he believes is the fertility drug (it is actually the malaria vaccine). Mr. Fox’s willingness to trade Marina for corporate profit in the form of a game-changing fertility drug exposes his true values and motives for the trip. He is ultimately a cynical CEO, an individual determined to realize his personal and corporate agenda regardless of the human and environmental cost.