Any great novel will evoke an entire world, not necessarily different from whatever you choose to call reality, but still distinctive and alive. The latest work from Jessica Hagedorn, “Dream Jungle,” is not a great novel, but it manages to create a new world in the mind of the reader, which is a testament to how close Hagedorn is to becoming a great novelist.
The novel is the scattered
testament of a disparate group of characters whose lives are centered in the Philippines during the 1970s. The narrative follows them through their lives and trials, changing perspective rapidly in order to record their thoughts and opinions.
Real events from the country’s history slip in alongside nearly surrealist episodes of human tragedy as the narrative encompasses native tribes, Hollywood filmmaking, neo-colonialism and a wide range of
human failings.
The book opens with the discovery of what seems to be a “lost” tribe deep in the Philippine jungle. The discoverer is a wealthy playboy, one of the richest men on the island. The story of his discovery is interlocked with the story of one of his servants, a young girl who came under his employ after losing her father and twin brothers in a boating accident. Halfway through, the narrative shifts to an almost washed up American film actor who gets a role in a Vietnam War epic to be shot in the Philippines. He takes the opportunity to escape the stasis his life has fallen into. Most of the rest of the book covers the shooting of
this film, occasionally linking back to the opening narrative through interconnected characters and odd literary allusions.
The story covers so much ground that what plot can be discerned can only be forced to lumber forward through drastic flash forwards, which span years and even decades of the characters’ lives. This often leaves a number of loose threads laying in the dust, never to be picked up again.
The novel’s problems are entirely on a structural level. The writing itself is pure, clean-cut and evocative. Hagedorn’s prose show the signs of immense craft and care. There is no question she is a great writer, but in this case it is her vision of the novel that becomes a problem. The first half of the novel seems almost self-contained and works well on its own. Many passages have the flavor of magical realism yet they remain grounded in the physical and emotional hardships of everyday life in a politically volatile country. Had the book continued in this vein, we could be dealing with a masterpiece. Instead, Hagedorn shifts to the Hollywood epic, an often too thinly veiled representation of the making of “Apocalypse Now.”
The characterizations in this section are much weaker than in the first. The American filmmakers come off as shallow, vapid and unaware of the trouble they are causing. That in itself is not the problem. The problem is that they are nothing more than those things, hardly rising above the level of caricatures. Because many of the more interesting characters have been almost entirely dropped, there is no longer any reason to care about what is going on, except to spot the correlation between the fictional film and its real counterpart. These correlations, in fact, become much too distracting to be justified. Hagedorn often assumes the reader will know the actual story of the production and lets that stand in for her lack of character development.
Hagedorn also makes a number of literary allusions to Joseph
Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,”
the book that was the basis of “Apocalypse Now.” For example,
a reporter in the novel has the last name Marlowe, the name of
the main character in “Darkness.” But this connection quickly proves to be fallacious. The reporter attempts to contact two different characters: the playboy and the director of the film. Are both representations of Kurtz? The playboy is a more likely candidate, with his supposed discovery of the tribe (the validity of his claim is eventually called into question). The director’s story is dropped so suddenly, and with so little conclusion, that his involvement in the novel comes off as merely cursory.
In the end, what remains is a flawed book that comes very
close to being a great book. Hagedorn has the potential to be a formidable novelist. She just needs to hit her stride. Hagedorn will be appearing at the University on October 13 at 7 p.m. in the Knight Library Browsing Room.

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