Latitude Zero

Windsor Chorlton, Orion 1997


The blurb on the front of this paperback reads "Jurassic Park meets Lord of the Flies". Actually this is a bit misleading: there are no rampaging dinosaurs or supposedly extinct life forms here. The "Lord of the Flies" allusion, though, is grippingly real.

The two main protagonists in the story, Jay Boucher, an American journalist, and Candida Woodville, an English zoology graduate, find themselves on an expedition to some Indonesian islands by a radical conservation group, Wildguard, led by an ex-Hell's Angel and sponsored by a rock star and his supermodel girlfriend. Their airship crashes without being able to warn the authorities of their position, and thus the mixed bag of survivors find themselves on an island thrown onto their own resources. Despite optimism at the beginning, the humans soon come to blows (metaphorical and real) about how to proceed, their problems compounded by the presence not only of natural carnivores (tigers and crocodiles) but also of a human evil in their midst.

What gives Latitude Zero a contemporary twist when compared to Lord of the Flies is the "green" angle. The leadership of the Wildguard expedition is dogmatically eco-warrior, a mixture of Hell's Angel dogmatism (Leo Jaeger, the male leader) and Wiccan and New Age mysticism (Aquila Corrigan, his female partner). Thus in their first days on the island Jaeger will only allow fishing as a concession, rather than seeing it as essential for survival, and insists that they try to live off plant life. Aquila's views are chilling in their extremity: she wants to see the human population of the planet reduced to 500 million (about a tenth of what it is now), and yet later Jaeger reveals that she wants to have children of her own. The naivety of some eco-warriors is also exposed in Aquila's statement that if they respect the crocodiles the latter will leave them alone, to which the Australian on the expedition pithily replies, "They're not interested in your respect". Ironically the symbol of the expedition is a tiger's head, yet a tiger begins to prey on them, and similarly as might have been predicted the crocodiles also claim their victim.

Alongside the ruthless revelation of nature as "red in tooth and claw" comes the dreadful realisation that human nature is not basically good after all. The key figure here is Disco, a mysterious but malicious and malevolent character who joined the expedition at the last minute and who turns out to be devious and finally downright evil. He manages to play off the characters against one another as the situation deteriorates, and Chorlton must be complimented on creating a character that positively reeks of nastiness, whom you find yourself hating very quickly. The human flaws of the other survivors are also exposed and played upon, and external evil also bursts upon them in the form of pirates. Even then, however, there are a few surprises which I won't give away. All in all, then, Latitude Zero is very much a Lord of the Flies for our time.

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