Les Fleurs du Mal

If you’re tempted to think that Susan Orlean has boosted the octane in this fascinating book--that her tales of theft, hatred, greed, jealousy, madness and back-stabbing in the hothouse world of the Florida orchid trade have been heightened for dramatic effect--consider this:

After finishing “The Orchid Thief,” I stopped at a small orchid shop in a city more than 1,000 miles from the scene of the crimes and quirks recounted by Orlean. I was looking for inspiration and information, trying to grasp how strange-looking beautiful flowers can turn ordinary folks into thieves, villains and collectors, and the proprietor knew just about everyone mentioned in the book.

Moreover, she said, Orlean hadn’t gone far enough: There was no mention, for instance, of certain unsavory deeds perpetrated by one of the characters at a high school in Homestead, Fla., back in the early 1980s.

And how about the death threats made against certain participants at a certain orchid show? My informant had actually hired armed bodyguards to protect her investment. The orchid business, make no mistake, “is full of some very sick people.”

You will meet these people, along with others who seem to live blameless lives, in the pages of Orlean’s book. Yet the book is less about orchids than about people who succumb to their enchantments. The breadth of human character here displayed is wide, but the cast--saints and sinners, the long-dead and the latter-day--shares a singular passion for these unique flowers.

Orchids have a powerful sexual aura about them--the name, Orlean reports, comes from the Latin orchis, meaning testicle. She quotes one warning about them, printed in 1653: “They are hot and moist in operation, under the dominion of Venus, and provoke lust exceedingly.” Raymond Chandler once observed that orchid petalshad the texture of human skin.

So it is not surprising that orchids turn poor humans into addicts, questing fools, cranks and criminals. “The Orchid Thief” is about one victim, a crank named John Laroche, whose consuming love for the flowers put him in handcuffs. He is now facing criminal charges for stealing the blooms from a Florida nature preserve.

But credit Orlean for writing a book that is about more than Laroche and his obsession. The result is a work that in the last century might have been called something like “Travels in the Marginal & Central Regions of Florida, with a Catalog of their Remarkable Flora & Fauna and Conversations with, and Observations of, the Natives and Their Culture.”

With such a title, Orlean’s seventh chapter--”The Good Life”--might have been subheaded “Death of the stolen orchids--Immigrant plant species--A drive across the Everglades--Alligators a nuisance--A country store--the Faxahatchee Strand--Cypress islands--Bromeliads--Failed agriculture in the Faxahatchee--Feral pigs--Logging in the 1940s--Frauds and swindlers--A land fraud of the 1830s--Bogs and canals--’Hunters’ lightning’--Report of a bear--Heat and muck--A ranger guide and two large convicts--A sinkhole--A glimpse of wild orchids.”

If this suggests a certain lack of focus in the book, it is intended. “The Orchid Thief” wanders through the Florida swamps, browses among the thorny ranks of orchid breeders, brushes against the itchy mania of orchid enthusiasts, and visits both the mansions of those whom the flower has made rich and the back-road bungalows of those whom the mania has doomed.

This rambling tale-telling works more often than it fails; it’s rather like sharing the adventure, like not knowing what lies around the next bend in the swamp path. The history of orchid worship can thus be devoured in small morsels, set as it is among fresher, more zesty material.

But Orlean’s book has other more nagging failings. It is about 25 pages too long, padded out with odd digressions and retread observations. We learn early that some orchid breeders don’t like each other. Then we learn it again, and again. It is still being repeated on page 255. There are also some badly drawn images. Laroche is described as having “the posture of al dente spaghetti.” A convention center setting up for an orchid show “brimmed with the clang of hammers . . . and the squawk of truck tires in the loading dock.” Clang? Squawk?

And in other places Orlean lets her storytelling get in the way of science. Insects visit some orchids because they mistake the flowers for sexual partners or prey. Of such tricks, Orlean writes that “in other words, the orchid gets fertilized because it is smarter than the bug.” Charles Darwin, who wrote a book about how insects fertilize orchids, would surely cringe at this. Even with orchids, sex is an activity that proceeds without the dubious benefits of intelligence.

Such failings, however, are mere chigger bites in an engrossing journey through some very vivid territory. Concentrate on the thrilling tales of piratical early orchid hunters, many of whom perished in dreadful ways in their quest for newer, stranger, more valuable species. Then, when you’re finished, visit an orchid shop to dish the dirt. Just be careful about buying anything. As “The Orchid Thief” makes clear, that way madness lies.