Marina, Mr Fox has therefore decided, must now follow on, and report on Swenson instead. Swenson has written a rare letter, to inform Marina's boss, Mr Fox, that the employee he previously sent to Brazil to find and report on her has died. But Patchett is not afraid to keep the parallels with that troubling early 20th-century classic in play: Marina even has a Kurtz, in the shape of the mysterious and incommunicative scientist Dr Annick Swenson. In that respect, the more modern and open-minded Marina Singh, and her journey to the heart of darkness that is modern-day South America rather than colonial Africa, is a distinct improvement on Conrad's imperial, racist Marlow. The heroine of Ann Patchett's latest novel, which is set in the Amazon rainforest, knows that "it was somehow less humiliating, less disrespectful, to dance with the natives than it was to simply stand there watching them".
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