The Lost City of the Monkey God Review
Nonfiction
A Novelist Scours the Honduran Jungle for Pre-Columbian Ruins. The Jungle Scours Him Back.
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THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD
A True Story
Past Douglas Preston
326 pp. Grand Central Publishing. $28.
The year may nevertheless exist young, merely I would wager a small fortune that Douglas Preston has already written the best ophidian-decapitation scene of 2017. The passage is nestled midway through "The Lost City of the Monkey God," Preston's business relationship of accompanying an archaeological trek through the wilds of eastern Honduras. Shortly after he and his group set upwards camp in La Mosquitia, a jungled expanse that conceals a trove of pre-Columbian ruins, Preston spots a venomous pit viper side by side to a hammock. He calls on Andrew Wood, a onetime British commando who has been hired to keep the trek'due south expiry toll to a minimum, to handle the matter. Wood does so past jabbing at the snake with a forked tree co-operative, to the snake's clear displeasure.
"Every bit its caput lashed back and forth, straining to sink its fangs into Woody'due south fist, it expelled poison all over the back of his hand, causing his skin to bubble," Preston writes. Subsequently he finally gets the improve of the fight and manages to lop off the snake'southward skull, Woods apologizes for failing to clean up the bloody aftermath right away; he explains that he had thought information technology wise to wash off the venom first, since it was starting to seep into an open wound.
Though I was enthralled by Preston's corybantic depiction of man-on-serpent violence, I also feared it signaled that his latest book was about to take a plough for the trite. Memoirs of jungle adventures too ofttimes devolve into lurid catalogs of hardships, as their authors take undue glee in detailing every bug bite, malarial fever and bad cup of instant java they've had to suffer. Just Preston proves too thoughtful an observer and too skilled a storyteller to settle for churning out danger porn. He has instead created something nuanced and sublime: a warm and geeky paean to the revelatory ability of archæology, tempered by notes of regret.
Preston has earned considerable fame every bit the co-writer, with Lincoln Kid, of brisk and noirish thrillers like final year's "The Obsidian Chamber." But he has as well long maintained a side gig as a magazine writer who specializes in chronicling quests for dinosaur basic, Egyptian tombs and Anasazi relics. While working on 1 such consignment for National Geographic in 1996, Preston starting time heard the fable of La Ciudad Blanca (the White City), an abandoned jungle metropolis said to be hidden deep within Mosquitia. Numerous explorers have sallied forth in search of this declared archaeological wonder, only to return with empty hands or fantastic lies. I British adventurer named Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, for example, claimed to accept stumbled upon the sunken continent of Atlantis while on a failed mission to locate the urban center in the early on 1930s. (Throughout his long and shady career, Mitchell-Hedges also falsely purported to have fought aslope Pancho Villa and to have hunted for sea monsters with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's son.)
The explorer virtually synonymous with La Ciudad Blanca is Theodore Morde, a Massachusetts-born journalist who fabricated his proper noun covering the Spanish Civil War. In 1940, Morde alleged that he'd found the fabled city after a torturous trek through Mosquitia. He described a walled settlement, big enough to have once housed xxx,000 people, that was festooned with elaborate carvings of monkeys. He refused to reveal the metropolis'southward location to anyone, including the millionaire oil heir who had financed his trip. Preston contends that Morde kept mum because he had engaged in a thou deception: He had spent all his time in Honduras prospecting for gilded rather than looking for the White Urban center as he had promised his patron. (Morde receives a fuller and more forgiving portrait in some other recent book, Christopher S. Stewart'southward "Jungleland.")
Morde's colorful tales may have been bunk, but decades later they helped inspire a cinematographer named Steve Elkins to try to find the White City with the aid of avant-garde technology. Thanks to some Hollywood wheeling and dealing — an executive producer of the moving-picture show "Beasts of No Nation" pops upwards in Preston's narrative — Elkins raised enough money to have a chunk of Mosquitia surveyed with an aircraft-mounted lidar scanner, which uses lasers to observe topographical anomalies. The scans revealed something potentially majestic beneath the jungle canopy: evidence of moldering buildings, plazas and possibly even a brawl court.
Preston was not disappointed by what he saw on the 2015 expedition to explore the ruins, though he admits that a layperson might feel otherwise. "The jungle-choked mounds in Mosquitia are, at first glance, not nearly as sexy as the cut-stone temples of the Maya or the intricate gilt artwork of the Muisca," he writes. But by letting archaeologists riff on the possible meanings of specific objects, Preston builds a compelling case for the scientific significance of what the trek unearthed. He takes evident delight, for case, in listening to a Colorado State University professor explain how stone jars rimmed with "triangular-headed humanoid figures" could symbolize "bound captives, ready for sacrifice."
The book'due south most affecting moments don't center on the ruminations of archaeologists, nonetheless, only rather on the otherworldly nature of the jungle — a place that Preston portrays equally alike to a sentient creature. He marvels at how the jungle flooring undulates with a "greasy, jittering flow" of cockroaches, and he shares his awe at the "chromatic infinities" of the impenetrable flora that has frustrated generations of explorers. And as the nifty calibration of the archaeological site becomes clear, Preston laments that the yearslong process of earthworks will inevitably rob Mosquitia of much of its mystique.
"I had the sense that our exploration had diminished information technology, stripping information technology of its secrets," he observes upon parting for home. Every bit Adam and Eve can well attest, the pursuit of noesis is never without its unintended consequences.
For all his marvel about the Mosquitia ruins, Preston exhibits puzzlingly footling interest in Republic of honduras itself. He appears to take met few ordinary Hondurans during his travels, and the book can occasionally feel clinical as a outcome. At 1 indicate, for example, Preston mentions that a town he stopped in has been plagued by drug-related violence. "Nevertheless, we were bodacious that we were in no danger considering of our guard of aristocracy Honduran soldiers," he curtly notes, before switching dorsum to discussing his preparations for the jungle. Preston also seems largely indifferent to the Honduran public's feelings about the ruins, which may or may non exist connected to the White Metropolis myth; nosotros hear a good bargain from the nation's president, who lauds a projected rise in tourism, but not much from anyone of lesser rank who might take more complicated views of what's to come for Mosquitia and its inhabitants.
It is hard to feel anything but sympathy for Preston, however, given that he ended upward suffering so grievously for the sake of this book. I won't spoil the nasty means by which the jungle exacted its revenge on the Mosquitia trek, except to say that I wouldn't arraign Preston in the slightest if he chooses to stick to fiction from now on. Simply allow's hope that doesn't terminate up being the instance, for few other writers possess such heartfelt appreciation for the ways in which artifacts can yield the stories of who nosotros are.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/books/review/lost-city-of-monkey-god-douglas-preston.html
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