In the 1860s, Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh, wanders through the wilds of New Zealand, contemplating recent scientific discoveries and their troubling implications for traditional religion and humanity's place in the cosmos. Nearly two hundred years later, a woman named Madeleine and a man named James meet at a coffeehouse, where they experience a profound intellectual connection over discussions of the poet Rilke and the promises and perils of AI. Madeleine exhibits a genius-level intelligence and the ability to quote large chunks of the Alice books from memory. Instantly smitten, James accompanies her on a trek through the New Zealand wilderness, a landscape of rivers that have claimed many lives. Alone in the wild, they battle sudden storms, fellow travelers with dubious intentions, and their own feelings of love and jealousy toward each other. Then, James makes a discovery about his companion that shakes him to his core.

This is a bold, ambitious novel, one that assumes the intelligence of its reader and doesn't pander. The meet-cute between Madeleine and James, along with the conversations that follow, in which they discuss anthropology, etymology, and the immortality of the soul, recalls the love affair between Jesse and Céline in the film Before Sunrise and its sequels. An early meeting with Madeleine on a beach carries echoes of the famous "ineluctable modality of the visible" sequence in Ulysses and Stephen Dedalus's life-altering vision of beauty in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Rather jarringly, Samuel Butler reads the ESV translation of the Bible, published in 2001—a rare timeline lapse in a book whose period setting is otherwise impeccable. Here is a book thrilling in its audacity and sublime in its execution.

Return to USR Home