Told from the point of view of various worker ants, “The Anthill Chronicles” is a fascinating representation of the instinctual attitudes and behaviours of an anthill’s different castes, from warriors to nurses, from scouts to “captains.” What makes the novel really worth reading, even fascinating, is the powerful middle section of the book, in which Wilson turns away from the human story to tell the tale of an eventful summer for the inhabitants of three anthills that cluster, unremarked, along the riverbank by which the novel’s human characters play and work. If you like that kind of story, and if you’re satisfied with the limited prose stylings of today’s typical popular novels, it’s a good enough novel with which to pass an evening. If Anthill contained just the story of the young insect-lover who grew up to become an eco-lawyer and save the wilderness that nurtured him as a child, it would be worth no more space than it’s been given already. The boy’s story disappears in the second section, to which we’ll turn in a moment, to reappear in the pending ecological disaster story that turns the book’s last third into an even more standard, and less satisfying, story of an environmental warrior - the boy from the first part, who abandoned his biology studies to become, presciently, a skilled lawyer - who outmaneuvers the developers he works for to save his beloved river. However, other than several funny passages in which his human characters act a lot like ants, this first part of the book is pretty standard fare, as fiction goes. He obviously draws on his own, very similar childhood for this part of the book, and to that extent it’s mildly interesting. In the first section, he recounts his pre-teen protagonist’s love of the wilderness and fascination with insects.
Wilson divides his novel into three parts. So I had no presumptive reason to dislike a book that won several smaller fiction prizes.Īs it turns out, I did like Anthill – but only the middle third of it. I don’t find Wilson’s ideas on social or group selection particularly alarming. I approached Anthill (2010) without much preconception.
This seems somehow appropriate, since many of his critics have long maintained that his ideas about the application of insect social structures to human societies are, indeed, fiction. Now in his 80′s, Wilson has recently tried his hand at a novel. Wilson is often described as “the world’s leading authority on ants.” His fascination with the “superorganism” of the anthill has brought him fame, but his attempts to explain human sociology in insect terms has also made him perhaps the most controversial life scientist of the last fifty years. Had all of Anthill been of the kind and quality of the middle third, Wilson’s book might have surpassed the best of the popular animal POV novels.Įdward O.
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