Rainforest by Michelle Paver

I would like to thank Orion for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher - Orion

Published - Out Now

Price - £20 hardback £11.99 ebook

The jungle watches. The dead remember.

The virgin rainforest seems a paradise to Englishman Simon Corbett. A last chance to salvage his career. A final refuge from a terrible secret.

But the jungle is no Eden. It hides secrets of its own. It does not forgive.

As Simon is drawn deeper into its haunted shadows, he learns to his horror that the past will not stay buried. For there are places in the forest where the line between the living and the dead is thinner than the skin of water.

The ghost story always seems to be related to places that are dark and cold. We expect things to bump in the night and our skin to feel the goosebumps. We don’t often in the U.K. imagine ghosts in the warmer and sunnier places and yet Michelle Paver in their new novel Rainforest takes us into a trip into rainforests bordering Mexico and Guatemala where a man with his own secrets finds the unknown is awaiting him.

Simon Corbett is a forty something academic far more interested usually in insects than people. His career has been hanging on an edge and he has been persuaded to attach himself to a new archeological dig in a Rainforest that is exploring Mayan ruins. Corbett wants to just study mantids but finds himself being forced to help his colleagues in the fog and also limited in how far he can travel himself. Corbett is also hiding the secret that led to his career troubles and he fears that someone is watching him that he knows can’t as she died months ago.

This was a mixed bag of a reading experience and unusually it’s the supernatural element that I felt didn’t quite work. I really enjoyed the setting told primarily by Corbett we feel the scale, beauty, strangeness and danger of the environment. It’s very much something much bigger than humans and this tale is set in the 1970s when even less was known about Rainforests and their inhabitants. It’s a sumptuous place of float and fauna that feels constantly alive and watching. This really adds a sense of mystery which Paver also wraps up into the strange history of Mayan culture a civilisation that was skilled and potentially very bloodthirsty and whose descendants live now in very different circumstances. It’s described in detail and is full of history and culture that is fascinating to read up on.

I also liked that we have an unusually unlikeable main character. Corbett is very much an unsociable person who we realise is very much happy not to be around people. His diary is full of complaints about people and how they get in the way. Indeed the rest of his team are creepy in various ways, rude and often thinking and saying racist things about their local guides and helpers. Pacer is very much putting the two groups against each other and Corbett is resolutely not keen to mix with anyone. What sets his heart alight is insects and indeed he feels far more at home looking at a mantis than talking to people. Paver though in Corbett’s diary shows he has had a moment of feelings connection and this experience with a young woman named Penelope has been his undoing. What we find out about this is where Corbett’e lack of social skills crossed the barrier into a true level of creepiness and while Pver makes us at least understand why he’s done this he never comes across as as anything more than selfish. The fact he can’t really remember much of what she talked about is incredibly telling. It’s quite unusual to have a main character I find myself saying you really deserve what’s happening to you.

But my overall feeling is the supernatural elements don’t quite work. the initial idea of a haunting makes sense but then we wrap this into a bigger story of Mayan history, traditions such as taking drugs and communing with gods. It’s very respectful of the culture but for me never gets particularly unsettling. There are a series of escalations all leading to a finale and then things sputter out. Lessons are learnt and things move on. There ultimately feels not enough story to justify the length and pacing and this feels more suited to a tight novella rather than a short novel length tale.

Rainforest is an engaging read with a fascinating location but feels a very traditional and standard supernatural take that doesn’t really make me feel a sense of growing horror. I think this could be an entertaining read but may not be that memorable beyond that sense of location.