The Devil's Garden, By Edward Docx

Abiologist of uncertain provenance and mixed motives, Dr Forle and his non-native team studies the behaviour of a species of ant at a state-owned river station deep in the South American jungle. Its labyrinthine lushness can bewilder and madden foreigners in just a few hundred unguided paces. The ants attack all plants other than their host, creating denuded glades within the forest known locally as devil's gardens. Forle is trying to prove that the species is engineering its own environment.

The river station is surrounded by many Indian tribes in an area steeped in slavery and exploitation. It is host to ruthless drug traffickers, threatened by oil and timber prospecting, and governed by the greed of muscular interests that have no interest in indigenous welfare. As usual, the Indians are caught in the middle.

Into this volatile mix walk the Judge, an urbane, sinister man come to register indigenous voters; and the Colonel, whose soldiers seem to enjoy a lawless remit. The soldiers mirror the jungle's encroachment in their casual cruelty and rapacious predation of food and women. Their presence quickly warps the microcosm of the river station to their own needs.

The parallel desecrations of ant and human make Edward Docx's relatively simple plot cohere into a substantial theme. "There's no before and after in the world of ants. As far as they are concerned, the Earth is already theirs," Forle states. "We are not a moderate species," a colleague extrapolates, as the plot accelerates. "We are swarming all over the world."

This conflation (or perhaps reduction) of predatory behaviours gives a queasy ethical framework to Docx's third novel, and gives texture to an otherwise linear plot populated by sharply defined characters. The judge, whose existential rhetoric is akin to the figures of early Cormac McCarthy, harangues the scientists with questions of liberty and rights, democracy and progress. Forle (whose arguably parasitic presence is partly an escape from prior misconduct and "one last effort" to save his soul) is driven to find some moral purchase in his deteriorating circumstances.

Rather than borrowing Conrad's jungle as a cipher for the threshold of sanity or the collapse of civilised order, Docx cleverly uses its hothouse environment to intensify existing fault-lines in human behaviour. Forle's growing discomfort transforms the plot's early lassitude into a violent energy. The result is a charged, compelling fiction that moves from uncomfortable stand-off to murderous pursuit while tilting at some of the cherished liberal ideals of Western civilisation.