I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to be posting stuff here, what with the sale to Amazon, but until I decide where I'm going I might as well continue.

In brief: US postgrad Annabel Mendelssohn, still in grief over the drowning death (possibly suicide, possibly just accident) of her marine-biologist elder brother Robert, goes to Australia to study spectacled fruit bats for her doctoral thesis, and, in a more-or-less platonic fashion, becomes fond of the man supervising the group of students, the scatterbrained Professor John Goode. When he goes missing, at first no one thinks too much of it; he's done this sort of thing often enough before, always turning up after a few days safe and sound. Annabel goes off into the forest to study her colony of bats; when, however, anti-environmentalist loggers try to destroy the colony, Annabel returns to civilization to discover Goode is still missing. The main thread of the story becomes Annabel's hunt alongside the professor's son, Leon, for the lost man, the two of them falling in love as they search.

It's been at least a year or two since I last enjoyed a novel as much as I did this one: beautifully written and paced, it drew me in from the start and thereafter let me go only with great reluctance when things like work and sleep demanded. The wilderness descriptions were wonderfully evocative, and even more so the depictions of bat behaviour; but it was the characters -- including Annabel's elder, somewhat motherly married sibling Alice, fretting from suburban Connecticut over the fate of her little sister in distant Oz -- that really pulled me along. The tale itself has many of the characteristics of a scientific investigation; Annabel and Leon set off in search of one thing but, perfectly satisfyingly, discover another instead, just as so often happens in research. It evokes, too, the feel of science and scientific communities. Coupling these traits with the ecological/ethological setting, what we have is a book that could be fitted into that very small subcategory of science fiction that concerns itself with working scientists; it doesn't have the wacky skiffy ideas of something like Gregory Benford's Timescape, but it shares with that core sf novel the realistic portrayal of scientists as real, ordinary, often flawed people engaged simultaneously in science and everyday life.
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