cover image Green Fires: Assult on Eden: A Novel of the Ecuadorian Rainforest

Green Fires: Assult on Eden: A Novel of the Ecuadorian Rainforest

Marnie Mueller. Curbstone Press, $19.95 (318pp) ISBN 978-1-880684-16-0

The politics of the rain forest, the fragile emotional state of a newly married couple and old-fashioned capitalist corruption are combined in Mueller's first novel, a historical romance that pushes against the boundaries of the genre. In 1969, Annie Saunders, an American and a Jew, and her new husband, German-born Kai Schmidt, are on their honeymoon in Ecuador, where she once worked as a Peace Corps volunteer. They soon find themselves taking a tortuous trip downriver to meet an eccentric German named Haberle, who lives deep in the rain forest and purportedly has befriended the indigenous tribes who are being napalmed by Somaxo, a multinational oil company that covets their territory. Paralleling the couple's journey into the political problems of the rain forest is Annie's private psychological journey through feelings of aggression toward her husband for his father's Nazi past, grief over her mother's suicide and confusion about her liberal beliefs. While Mueller presents the central relationship in realistic detail, she comes close to sentimentalizing the Indians and their lives in their eponymous ``Eden.'' Conrad's Heart of Darkness provides the themes here, but the mysterious man at the center of the literal and psychological journeys is driven by pacifism rather than by nihilism. (Apr.)