A novel like Darwin’s Wink is necessarily the result of a mixture of experience, research, and imagination. The seed of the novel was planted during my first trip to the island of Mauritius in 1995: I was there at the invitation of my older sister and her son, whose wife is from Mauritius. For weeks before the trip—which takes 24 hours by plane from San Francisco, as it is on the opposite side of the globe—I felt an immense excitement at the idea of visiting a real “exotic” “tropical” island; in fact while Mauritius is both of those things, it is also a country in its own right, with a multi-ethnic population of two million, a rich Hindu and colonial Franco-British legacy, and a thriving textile and tourist industry.
Among the regular guests at my nephew’s restaurant were two young British naturalists; they invited me to visit the small island where they were doing restoration and conservation work, Île aux Aigrettes. I instantly saw the romantic potential of the place: the old colonial warden’s house where they lived; the rich abundance of nature, with the added interest of the endangered bird species they were there to foster: kestrels, pink pigeons, echo parakeets. I took a few notes, on the off chance that the visit would yield a novel.

Several months later, back in the Bay Area, a friend invited me to hear a lecture by nature writer David Quammen, who had just published “The Song of the Dodo.” His lecture touched on Mauritius and provided some of the scientific background to the impetus for the conservation work there, even mentioning individuals whose names I had heard in conversations between my nephew and other locals. I took a few more mental notes and, at the first opportunity, got hold of a copy of his book; but as I was busy with other things, I was not yet sure I was ready to write about a subject I did not know that much about.
In the fall of 1997 I accepted a teaching position at a private language school in Zagreb, Croatia. I had been following the break-up of Yugoslavia with horror and great sadness; while it was not a country I knew well, having only passed through on my way to Bulgaria or Greece, its very proximity to those two countries made it somehow special to me, as if those other Balkan countries might share a similar vulnerability—as they clearly had in the past. To be based in Zagreb for a year was an enlightening, sobering, and enriching experience. Some of my students had been soldiers; others were refugees from Vukovar or Bosnia. All had had some experience of the war, even if it was only of the Serb war planes flying overhead. I met an American nurse who had been with a trauma unit at the front; I met another American who had been excavating mass graves in Eastern Bosnia. Everyone shared a bit of their experience with me. In the winter of 1998 I travelled into Bosnia from Bulgaria, via Belgrade; the country was still divided and I had to walk across the “border” between the Serb entity and Sarajevo itself. In Sarajevo I met people who had managed to go abroad during the war, and others who had lived through the siege, and still others who had fled to Sarajevo from elsewhere in Bosnia, people who had lost everything. I observed, took notes, and returned to Zagreb sobered and changed by the experience.
Back in Zagreb I asked my daughter to forward Quammen’s book to me. I was beginning to have an idea for a workable story: an American naturalist could be working in Mauritius and hire a Western European man, an emotional refugee from the Bosnian war, to help her with her work there. It might seem contrived, but I had had ample opportunity to observe how people from all over the world could end up in unexpected places. I spent my free time reading “The Song of the Dodo” and learning about island biogeography. I began to see themes and patterns which could underlie a story of human beings as well: migration, habitat, the role of random factors, survival, extinction. Darwin himself, at that point, became a character.
I started writing on the Swiss national holiday, August 1, 1998; I was staying in a writers’ retreat outside Lausanne, in a wonderful villa which had been the home of the German publisher Ledig. There were signed letters from Hemingway, artwork by Picasso and Henry Miller and Robert Crumb; there was the chess table where Vladimir Nabokov had played with his host. It became clear to me that the main male character for my novel should be Swiss; at one time the majority of the delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross were Swiss. This would also be a way to write indirectly about a country where I had lived for sixteen years, one which contrasted greatly with the others I would describe in my book. My portrait of Switzerland may not be flattering; it is a country which breeds a kind of moral and emotional frustration, but that very frustration has given rise to greater things, from Henri Dunant’s creation of the Red Cross to my character Christian’s desire to work for that organization. While I was there that summer, my niece introduced me to friends who had been Red Cross delegates, and thus I heard first hand of the sense of both usefulness and frustration—and the occasional exhilaration— which go with the job of humanitarian worker. All such encounters, however brief, helped to give me, at least, a sense of authenticity in what I was writing.
In 1999 when I had a solid finished draft of the novel (working title: Egret Island) I went for a second time to Mauritius. This was a very different trip, definitely with research in mind. I returned to Île aux Aigrettes and asked a lot of questions, checked my facts, found new ideas. I spent hours talking with my nephew’s wife about the behavior of young Hindu women on the island (she herself is Hindu) to make the character of Asmita believable; some major plot changes came about as a result. I soaked up the atmosphere and wondered if I were doing justice to this enchanting island. Above all I observed the birds—the mynahs who would come into my room and converse, the little fodies at dusk on the tree outside my window—and began to feel an affinity with the main character Fran, as if she had become a real person.
Binding all these disparate factors together are two abstract concepts: globalization and Darwinism. They are not unrelated; I have come to realize, precisely from having flown twice around the world to reach Mauritius (once via Hong Kong, once via Paris), just how small and crowded the planet has become. We all struggle for our own space, both mental and physical; and yet thousands of species are becoming extinct every year because of our need to expand. I hope this book will bring home some of these themes to readers, and make them stop and think about how better to share that space with the other, more fragile, inhabitants of the earth.