Pathless Forest by Chris Thorogood review – love letter to a monstrous flower

A botanist goes in search of the vast, stinking Rafflesia in its natural habitat

If you think of flowers as beautiful, fragrant, decorous and domesticated – something you order from an online florist or pick up at your local garden centre – Chris Thorogood’s Pathless Forest should come with a health warning. It’s a love letter to the largest flowers in the world: the monstrous blooms of the 40-odd species – no one knows quite how many exist, or may have already been driven to extinction – of Rafflesia. This stinking, sprawling “corpse flower” grows in the tropical rainforests of Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines, and from its nickname on, nothing about it is pretty. It’s a parasite that mimics the odour and appearance of rotting flesh to attract its favoured carrion fly pollinators, with a bouquet featuring notes of “blocked drains”, “sewage”, “pigs’ shit” and “bad chicken”.

It’s also the lifelong love of Thorogood, a botanist and academic who admits to a relationship with Rafflesia that echoes the monomania of any Werner Herzog antihero. “Dragged helplessly to heaven through hell and back, he became half-sick with his obsession to find it,” he writes of himself; like its subject, his prose is undemure, supersized, unbound by convention. The story starts with Thorogood as a plant-bewitched child, modelling Rafflesia blooms from papier-mache in an overgrown cemetery behind his family home. (He’s also a botanical artist with a popular Instagram account, and Pathless Forest is illustrated with his own detailed, atmospheric drawings and paintings of expedition colleagues, rainforest plants – and Rafflesia in all its liver-coloured, white-splotched glory.)