Rating: 
Summary: Meditation on a worthwhile life
Review: Spanning 200 years, the stories of Servants of the Map, address issues of personal discovery against a backdrop of the scientific and natural world. Barrett is strongest with her historical settings, where time moves more slowly and there is more solitary introspection. We can better hear the poetic expression of quietly falling snow or the wind in the trees. Yet the strongest statement the book makes, including the contemporary stories, is the almost invisible thread that binds the characters to each other and to history. Diaries, letters, old notebooks, and old memories amplify the connections. Whether it is Max , the 1861 surveyor of the Himalayas or his wife Clara many years later in another story in America, two sisters with two different lives in two different stories, and the same for a separated brother and sister, the search for identity and the yearning for a life that matters and that is authentic is universal. Nor does Barrett stop there. For example, the last story, The Cure, brings back Nora from the haunting title story of her last collection, Ship Fever, and also refers obliquely to characters from her novel, The Voyage of the Narwhal. This new collection is an eloquent companion to those earlier works. After reading the stories, you feel like you have shared in a personal meditation with these characters.
Rating:
Summary: Mapping the contours of the heart
Review: This is a brilliantly written collection of stories that seamlessly meshes fact with fiction, science with love and faith, and the pursuit of exploration and discovery with the satisfaction of the simpler life. There are so many interesting insights into the emotions of her created characters that we wonder if there is any parallel with the lives of real adventurers.The opening title story of SERVANTS OF THE MAP starts us off well. The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India begun in the mid 19th century was a grand exercise of mapping the sub-continent. The map contours of interest were the peaks and valleys of the "still to be named" mountains of northern India. We meet Max Vignes, a draughtsman who when not sketching the details of what would later be the Himalayas, was looking down and passionately observing plants, leaves, and lichen. Max is obsessed with botany and the real mapping done by Barrett is of the contours of Max's heart. We see him torn between his love for his wife Clare and his two daughters and his all consuming scientific enthrallment with plants. This is just the first story and yet Barrett's technique of interweaving the real and the imagined, and her theme of scientific enquiry juxtaposed against the demands of the human heart, are both already fully developed and flowering. She goes on to explore this some more with "Two Rivers" where academically inclined Samuel seeks to disprove all non-theological explanations for fossils. We are transported to the world of emerging Darwinism and Barrett uses Samuel to investigate the inner difficulty of reconciling oneself to change and adapting to a new world-view. It's an issue that has as much resonance today as it did in Samuel's world of 100 years ago. Other stories where this inner geography is explored are "Theories of Rain" and "The Forest" and some of the colorful characters are Aunt's Daphne and Jane, Bianca Marburg, and Nora Kynd who appears in the last story "The Cure". Max, Clare and their daughter Elizabeth also make a return. In a fitting summation to the book Clare shows her ambivalence to Max's return. It's a perfect illustration of the truth that with the human heart there will always be undiscovered territory. "I do love him," she says. "Or I did - how can I know what I feel anymore..." This is my first book by Barrett but I've already begun what I can only hope is an equally enjoyable journey with another one.
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