'Anthill' is for Evergreen what 'TKAM' is for Monroeville

One of Evergreen’s finest citizens, Bert Cook, recently loaned me an outstanding book, “Anthill: A Novel” by E.O. Wilson, and I just finished reading it the other day.

In short, “Anthill” is for Evergreen what “To Kill a Mockingbird” is for Monroeville.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” is set is the fictional town of Macomb, Alabama, which is eerily similar to 1930s Monroeville, the town where the book’s author, Harper Lee, grew up.

“Anthill” is set is the fictional town of Clayville, which is eerily similar to Evergreen, a town where E.O. Wilson lived briefly during his childhood. If you read the geographic and descriptive clues in “Anthill,” it’s clear that Clayville and Evergreen are one and the same.

On top of this, Bert Cook and his wife, Susan, got the chance to meet Wilson during a book-signing event a year or so ago, and Wilson admitted to Bert that Clayville is based on Evergreen. The book also mentions a number of other southwest Alabama towns by name, including Monroeville, Thomasville and Brewton.

Published in April 2010, “Anthill” is Wilson’s 25th book, but his first novel. Wilson, 81, is best known for being the two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and for his scientific career as a biologist, researcher and naturalist. His scientific specialty is myrmecology, that is, the study of ants, and he is credited with being the first researcher to discover fire ants in the U.S. He accomplished that at age 13, discovering fire ants near Mobile.

Wilson makes fine use of his ant expertise in “Anthill,” which merges the tale of a young naturalist and a colony of ants living on a tract of longleaf pine savanna called the Nokobee tract. The young naturalist, Raphael “Raff” Semmes Cody, grows up to study entomology at Florida State and law at Harvard before getting the chance to save Nokobee from developers.

While all of that is going on, the ants at Nokobee - three different colonies of them - war it out for dominance. This portion of the book, called “The Anthill Chronicles,” is the most fascinating part of the book. It shows how the ants interact with each other and with the humans, aka, the “tree-trunk gods,” that they come in contact with.

I really enjoyed this 378-page book and recommend it to anyone in the reading audience. Like me, you’ll probably never look at ants the same way again.

If you enjoy “Anthill,” you’ll likely enjoy some of Wilson’s other books. He won the Pulitzer Prize for “On Human Nature” in 1979 and for “The Ants” in 1991.

How many of you have had a chance to read “Anthill”? What did you think about it? Did you like/dislike it? Let us know in the comments section below.