Once upon a time I had wanted to find out why a pet fish was so irresistible that people smuggled it into the United States, risking their very liberty. Three and a half years and fifteen countries later, I was now in Brazil (possibly illegally) pursuing the fish myself. At some point, things had gotten out of hand.After being intrigued by stories of high stakes fish smuggling from a real life Pet Detective – Lieutenant John Fitzpatrick of New York's State Environmental Police – and in receipt of a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship in need of a research topic, investigative journalist Emily Voight decided to enter the shadowy world that surrounds the sale and collecting of the world's most expensive aquarium fish: the arowana or dragon fish. No more interested in guppies and goldfish than the average person, Voight eventually found herself becoming as obsessed with the arowana as any “Arofanatic” and The Dragon Behind the Glass is as much about her own obsessive quest to find a wild population as it is about the fish itself. With an organic blend of travelogue and science/history writing – all in a perfectly journalistic yet playful tone – I couldn't help but getting swept up in the quest myself. Plain fun and intriguing reading.
As Voight says in this National Geographic article, “The history of this one single fish encapsulates the history of modern conservation.” As she discovered, for no good reason (and in a move that was perhaps supposed to have been “deleted” before its implementation), an international conservation group in the '70s decided to put the arowana (which was a plentiful and not particularly tasty food fish, with sustainable habitats in several countries) on a restricted trade list. This had the effect of making it seem rare, and that sparked an explosion in collecting them from the wild for exotic specimen aficionados. This caused them to actually become rare, and as they are difficult (but not impossible) to breed in captivity, their scarcity has made millionaires of successful aquaculturists; and has also led to murder, burglary, and the poisoning of rival stocks. In her travels, Voight met those who sell the arowana and those who collect them, and also those naturalists who still scour the globe in search of new species. Falling deeper into the rabbit hole with every new contact, Voight followed every lead that might allow her to witness just one arowana in the wild, and as she pushed the legal limits in countries like Myanmar – travelling well beyond the areas designated for tourists, even as she knew she was being followed by government agents – I couldn't help but marvel at her nerves: a woman, travelling alone and off the map?
In that moment, as I recalled what I'd read about the Asiatic reticulated python (the longest snake in the world at more than twenty feet), as well as lightning strikes, crocodiles, and the well-documented case of an orangutan raping a woman, I began to have second thoughts about what I was doing back in Borneo. My doctor had warned me not to immerse myself in the water, where a snail-borne parasite could cause permanent paralysis. How much was I willing to risk to go after a fish I didn't even think was good looking?In addition to the travel writing about the exotic locales Voight visited and the colourful people she met there, she also seamlessly adds information about the history of specimen collecting, the work of those who are still in the field, and the evolution of Biology from the study of whole organisms to that of genetics (she and the field workers she meet all agree that there's something of its magnificence lost when a live organism is reduced to bits of code). In the few negative reviews I've read for The Dragon Behind the Glass, readers complain that Voight put too much of herself in this book – that it's more “accidental memoir” than scientific treatise – but I would argue that it was Voight's own experience that makes the whole story about the arowana relatable: it's her own obsession to find a wild specimen and the way that that mirrors the larger story about obsessive collectors that gives the reader perspective. And without being a preachy environmentalist book, the fact that Voight kept failing in her visits to areas formerly teeming with arowanas is its own science lesson.
When I first set out to write about the arowana, I had been attracted to the humor and the high drama of the fish world, to the eccentricities and obsessions of the people who were part of it. But there was no way to think about the arowana – about any fish, really – without confronting loss on a scale too large for the human mind to comprehend. I had come so far to find one wild thing, to experience the wild itself, and all I had to show for my quest was a cult, a cockroach, and a starving dog. Despite myself, tears welled up in my eyes and spilled down my cheeks.I liked everything about this book – it was intriguing, informative, and incredibly relatable – and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.
