One of the finest books I got from this summer’s round of swaps was this copy of Green Mansions from my friend Erin. Erin and I went to college together and have babies the same age, and also we have pretty similar taste in art and food, so it is not surprising that she found the perfect book for me.

WH Hudson was a writer who wrote about birds for most of his career, except for a few novels that were mostly panned – Green Mansion is his masterpiece, but I would very much like to read The Purple Lands, which is supposed to be his second-best. Anyway, he was a respected naturalist, and naturalists write the best doomed romances – they can put all this ominousness into birds and snakes and foliage and so forth, and because they’re naturalists it all feels very easy and correct.

          Green Mansions is set in the Orinoco basin rainforest, and Hudson, the naturalist, is at his best when he describes the forest:

 

Lying on my back and gazing up, I felt reluctant to rise and renew my rambles. For what a roof was that above my head! Roof I call it, just as the poets in their poverty sometimes describe the infinite ethereal sky by that word; but it was no more roof-like and hindering to the soaring spirit than the higher clouds that float in changing forms and tints, and like the foliage chasten the intolerable noonday beams. How far above me seemed that leafy cloudland into which I gazed!

 

The plot is pretty standard: boy escapes from political unrest by running away into the jungle, boy finds beautiful jungle girl, they fall in love, girl is killed by unfriendly Indians and boy spends a long time living by himself in the jungle before returning to civilization a changed person. In lesser hands – say, oh, Rider Haggard  – this would be a short, boring, maudlin thing; but Hudson puts so much description and thought into each chapter that it becomes one of those stories that kind of pick you up and take you away as long as you’re reading it; a lovely, sad, slow book.

          And this is an ex-student copy, so the whole thing is covered in underlining and marginalia, which form a whole second layer to the story. Reading both together is almost like reading the novel again for the first time, like when one of the marginaliaists wrote Poetic Ambiage next to a paragraph about a thunderstorm, I want to write back: do you mean “ambiance” or” image”, or did you just make up a word? if so, good job.

          When I was in high school, we passed notes, but the kids required to read this particular copy of Green Mansions were much more clever – they passed notes using the book itself, writing in pencil on the blank backsides of the illustrations. The best conversation is towards the end, in two different handwritings:

 

Friday we had a test in French?

 

RH was asked 12 different ?s, he kept saying I know what your saying but I don’t understand.

 

On that paper, could we make 2 para?

 

What topic did you use?

 

Lit. Short stories.

 

What test do we have in Eng tomorrow?

 

Anyway, it was a great novel to read, and if I needed another reason to find secondhand paperbacks (or friends with great taste in books) utterly charming, this book would be it.