I just finished reading a new non-fiction story of the jungle, David Grunn's The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. Grunn, a journalist, weaves together the story of British Victorian-era explorer Percy Fawcett and his obsession with finding a reputed lost ancient civilization in the Amazon with Grunn's own growing obsession with solving the mystery of what happened when Fawcett and his team disappeared seemingly without a trace.This book is part biography, as Grunn spends the first half or so detailing Fawcett's early military career and then the many expeditions he made into the South American interior, building his reputation and fame in the years before his final journey into the unknown. (He is the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World). Fawcett is called the "last Victorian gentleman explorer," representing the end of an era as exploration itself changed. What began as a field where courageous, and often eccentric, adventurers made names for themselves and victories for science by cutting through the jungle using their wits and their physical prowess was transforming into a field where new technologies like wireless radios, airplanes, and aerial photography would soon make people like Fawcett seem like foolhardy anachronisms.
The book is also part mystery, told from two perspectives 80 years apart. The world was paying attention when Fawcett and his team, which included his adult son and the son's best friend, disappeared in the jungle. Fawcett had arranged for financing that included support from an international newspaper syndicate following the team's progress through his periodic reports from the field. When the team lost touch, many from Fawcett's family and followers rallied to send search teams in after him, but many of those explorers met their fates in the jungle as well. These expeditions to find Fawcett, or a trace of what happened to him, have continued right up to the present day. The author Grann embarked upon his own adventure, from British archives to Brazilian museums to the Amazon jungle itself, investigating Fawcett's life and presumed death at the hands of the wild place he loved so much, as well as trying to find that Lost City of Z along the way.
I couldn't help but compare this book all along with another book I read 2 years ago, Candice Millard's excellent story about Theodore Roosevelt's own expedition to forge the "River of Doubt," an uncharted tributary of the Amazon. To my pleasant surprise, some of the same real-life characters appeared in both books, as many of the Brazilian officials encountered both Roosevelt and Fawcett in the heyday of European exploration into the jungle.
While the subject matter is similar, I enjoyed Millard's book more because her protagonist - the great TR - was such a charismatic, compelling, and relatable character. Grann suffers a bit, in my opinion, because Fawcett himself comes across as being aloof, unsentimental, obsessive almost to the point of madness. He doesn't seem to have strong family or emotional ties, and while Grann does demonstrate his notably progressive approach (for the time) towards dealing with the Indian tribes he encountered and shares some of Fawcett's interesting experimentation with spirituality and the occult, Fawcett remains a somewhat unreachable character. Since you know from the beginning that he doesn't make it back out of the jungle, I didn't really find myself rooting for him much. Instead, I enjoyed more of Grann's historical information about the Victorian explorers, the South American tribes, and the years of continued searching.
According to the Internets, Brad Pitt has snapped up the movie rights to this book, so we may soon be seeing Fawcett's adventures on the big screen. If Brad plays him, Fawcett will probably be a lot more relatable... so I'll be sure to check that out!
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