The Explorer

The Explorer takes place in the early 20th century and centers on a cast of British children captivated by tales in which British explorers brave the dangers of the Amazon rainforest. Protagonist Fred is particularly enthralled by such stories, having read dozens of them while recovering from pneumonia, using these dreams of adventure to distract himself from his illness.

The Amazon Rainforest—an immense wilderness spanning more than 2 million square miles—had a powerful hold on the English imagination during this era of rapid industrialization and modernization. The Amazon River basin contained some of the last places in the world unexplored by Europeans, and those who set out to map it became cultural heroes back home. Perhaps the most famous of these was Percy Fawcett. Fawcett believed there was an ancient, technologically sophisticated city hidden somewhere in the unexplored regions of the Amazon. He called this city “Z,” and between 1906 and 1925, he led several expeditions into the forest in search of it. On the last of these expeditions, Fawcett and his teenage son disappeared. Fawcett became the model for the archetype of the British explorer in literature and popular culture, and his exploits inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel The Lost World. Almost a century later, the journalist David Grann wrote about Fawcett’s adventures in The Lost City of Z, a nonfiction book that was later adapted as a 2016 film by writer-director James Gray. Fawcett is mentioned as one of Fred’s heroes in the novel, and he bears a notable resemblance to the unnamed “explorer” who serves as the children’s guide to the jungle.

Exploration of the Amazon has often come with devastating consequences for the forest’s inhabitants, both human and nonhuman. Contact with outsiders has sometimes led to outbreaks of illness among Indigenous people, and explorers like Fawcett—who claimed to seek only knowledge of the forest and its inhabitants—often paved the way for industrialists who sought to consume the forest’s resources for their profit. At the end of the book, the narrator suggests that Fred, who grew up fascinated by the stories of these early 20th-century explorers, will one day become “a new kind of explorer” (322)—one who respects the people and environments he learns about.