But as months pass, his letters to Clara begin to indulge in an honesty about the changes he sees in himself. Letters from his wife Clara, lovingly dated and sorted, are his sole connection to the life he left behind "in service of the map." In his correspondence, he initially withholds from Clara the harsh details of his surroundings and a near-death fall into a crevasse. In the title story of Barrett's new collection, Servants of the Map, Max Vigne, a surveyor and aspiring botanist, leaves his family in England for a surveying expedition in the Himalayas. And relationships inevitably buckle under the weight of obsessive dedication to work. Women hide their identities in order to be taken seriously as scientists and to challenge accepted theories. A lifetime of work goes unrecognized or-even more devastating-is proven false. While the quest for scientific discovery incites her characters to board ships heading for the Arctic or to dig for fossils among the Lakota in the Bad Lands, Barrett's depiction of this pursuit is not a particularly romantic one. Andrea Barrett claims to have been a poor science student, but to read her recent fiction is to appreciate the allure that science and natural history have always held for her-and for those who have pursued it from the nineteenth century to the present.
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