Green Mansions - W.H. Hudson

The story of a man forced to flee his home in Caracas due to some political upheaval, who winds up in the jungles of Guyana. While there, he ventures into a section of forest the native people don't enter, because there's thought to be a spirit that lives there. Instead he finds a mysterious girl who can speak in an odd, musical voice. He falls in love with her, it ends tragically, but not until after he's helped shatter a last happy illusion she had held.

The book was published in 1904, so it has some things in common with other stories about lost or hidden peoples found in the portions of the world unknown to white men. It also has a lot of casual racism about the inferiority of the native people in terms of their intelligence, often describing them as having only a 'low cunning', and having no hope of being able to think like a white man. There's a point where Abel is asked to kill the spirit with one of their weapons and throws it down, insisting a revolver is the weapon of a white man, and they would never use it to kill a woman. You might want to check the math on that one, buddy.

It's also, as I'd expect for the era, way overwritten for my tastes. Hudson never uses one word if he can use twelve instead. There's really no need to spend multiple pages on Abel trying to describe the world beyond her valley to Rima in as much detail as Hudson goes into. Or Rima praying to her mother to tell the angels to damn her grandfather for keeping secrets. Do I really need a verbatim account of her plea? When Hudson can restrain that impulse, it's written quite well. The descriptions of places and creatures are evocative, and the analogies are clever. The dialogue's a bit over the top for me at times, but probably about standard for the time and subject matter.

The story moves along fairly briskly, again when not grinding to a halt from too much description. Abel's search for the mysterious being in the forest. Rima's frustration with his inability to understand her true way of speaking, and her inability to understand what she sees in his eyes. Abel's kind of a surprise in that he's not some bold protagonist. He tries to lie or deceive, but Rima usually sees through it right off. He urges one village into attacking another village that made him angry, which results in every single person in said village being killed. He doesn't participate, merely agitates. If he was going to strike out of some misguided desire for vengeance, I'd expect him to handle things himself, and not to kill everyone in the process. If he's troubled by what happened, Hudson doesn't spend nearly as much time on that as he does on Abel moaning about in the forest over his lost Rima.

There's a core of something in here I would really enjoy, but there are too many conventions and trappings of the time it was written for it to really take.

'The pilgrim in the desert is sometimes attended by a bird, and the bird, with its freer motions, will often leave him a league behind and seem lost to him, but only to return and show its form again; for it has never lost sight nor recollection of the traveller toiling slowly over the surface. Rima kept us company in some such wild erratic way as that. A word, a sign from Nuflo was enough for her to know the direction to take; the distant forest or still more distant mountain near which we should have to pass. She would hasten on and be lost to our sight, and when there was a forest in the way she would explore it, resting in the shade and finding her own food; but invariably she was before us at each resting or camping place.'