Comment

Apr 18, 2012horthhill rated this title 1 out of 5 stars
Anthill by E.O. Wilson was a disappointing story. Wilson is a great naturalist but a poor writer of fiction. The novel seems to have six disconnected sections. The first sections revolves around the adolescent naturalist Raff Cody and his cousin. But the novel jumps to a second section which details the back story of Cody's parents. We never hear about the cousin again. The third section sees an older Cody at university studying biology. From the second section onwards, the narrative is often taken over by a professor who sees himself as mentor to Cody. Oddly enough we never get to see Cody's point of view of this relationship. How the professor should know so much about Cody is inexplicable. Why Wilson didn't stick with Cody's view point becomes apparent in the fourth section. This is called the Anthill Chronicles and is a seventy page digression about ants written as a sort of ant-sized fable. Acccording to the narrative, the professor wrote the Anthill Chronicles from Cody's undergraduate thesis. Very bizarre inclusion of this digression that has no obvious place in the narrative. At the conclusion of the ant story, a fifth section follows with a flowery description of life at Harvard as Cody enters law school. An awkwardly written romance occurs but like the cousin in section one, the girlfriend all but disappears from the story as the section ends. Then the final sixth section begins which is over-the-top in its strangeness. For some reason which is never explained and seems to happen without motivation, Cody is kidnapped and will be murdered. He does escape death during the massacre of his kidnappers. The story then ends happily ever after. If nothing else, Anthill could prove useful as an exemplar of how-not-to-tell-a-story.