Anthill: A Novel

  • E. O. Wilson
Norton: 2010. 384 pp. $24.95 978-0393071191 | ISBN: 978-0-3930-7119-1

Raff is the main character in Anthill, the first novel by the towering entomologist Edward O. Wilson. As a child, Raff lives in a world in which nearly everything is decided for him, either by his parents or by chance. He feels like an insect in the lawn — a tiny creature surrounded by big trees and adults. His hard-drinking father is only occasionally employed. His mother believes that she has chosen the wrong man and, in doing so, the wrong life. The most likely fate for Raff is a middling persistence, setting down one leg at a time on an almost inevitable path. But nature intervenes.

As a boy, Raff spends days and nights in a marshy pine forest across town from his house. That swamp changes Raff. He makes it his — an untamed land to know and to map. At first it seems to be an entire world, wild enough to hold a big alligator and thousands of unnamed forms of life. As he grows, the swamp shrinks, and what was once endless comes under threat from development. But Raff cares for the crooked trees and stinky water as much as he cares for any place or thing in the world. Soon he finds himself, against the wishes of nearly everyone around him, walking in the 'wrong' direction on the well-trodden track.

Raff fights for the swamp. His battle takes him to Harvard Law School and then to a job at the very company that plans, in the long term, to develop the swamp. And so the story unfolds; or rather, two stories unfold. Beneath Raff's story is a tale of ants, a second society beneath the leaves. The ant protagonist is a colony of an introduced species that grows unchecked, beyond reason and resources, like the introduced fire ants that Wilson discovered at the age of 13 at a dock in Mobile, Alabama. Their explosion mirrors the human story of suburban growth and 'progress' that Raff is pitted against. The ants do not provide a moral; they simply echo the seemingly inexorable expansions of our own colonies into every habitable land. It is this creeping inevitability from which Raff must break free.

The ant protagonist is a colony of an introduced species that grows unchecked, beyond reason and resources.

Anthill is the latest in a long line of Wilson's accomplishments. With his friend Bert Hölldobler, he wrote The Ants (Harvard University Press, 1990), the definitive book on ants. He also founded the field of sociobiology, which begat evolutionary psychology. But for me, Wilson's greatest achievement is that, like Carl Sagan, he has given us a view of the grandeur of the Universe. He sees life, with his one good eye, more vividly than other people. Fortunately, he shares his lens. “Have you seen this?” he seems to say. “Come over here and take a look.“

Wilson the novelist is no different, and Anthill also invites us to look carefully at the living world. Raff gives voice to Wilson's view of life. Indeed Wilson, like his protagonist, found inspiration and refuge in ants, had a favourite swamp, became an eagle scout, and ended up at Harvard University.

The book is filled with details of the living world. Here and there, as a dragonfly darting to a pond, Wilson is drawn to things that catch his eye. Sometimes describing them in too much depth, he immerses us in their richness. Yet the analogies between ant and human societies are deep, and only by revealing their intricacies can Wilson show how the fates of ants and young men can, sometimes, diverge. Ants, the details seem to urge, are like us — but at least we, like Raff, can exercise free will.

As a boy, Wilson would surely have loved this book. It casts him as a kind of small-town hero, with butterfly net and snake stick, rather than gun and cape. I can only hope that such a figure becomes a plausible hero for my children and their generation.

Anthill is a story about how one child can, inspired by the natural world, grow up to make a difference. We live in a time when the power of individuals seems to be shrinking, rather than growing — making us seem more and more like ants. In such times, we need hopeful books like this and more heroes such as Raff or Wilson.