The Apothecary

Within The Apothecary’s world of magical realism, mysticism and folklore exist alongside real-world places, circumstances, and concerns. The looming nuclear threat of the Cold War with Russia grows even as Benjamin and Janie learn about the existence of the Pharmacopoeia and the apothecary’s hidden world of magical, healing remedies. In the novel, much more is possible for the characters than people in the reader’s world generally consider, and science is responsible for most of those possibilities.

Janie accepts such possibilities more readily than Benjamin does, largely because she “allow[s] for [them]” (71), as the gardener instructs. Benjamin relies on what he has learned about the natural world in school rather than the information contained in the Pharmacopoeia. Of the recipe for the avian elixir, he says, “There are physical laws—the conservation of mass, for one thing. A human being can’t just become a tiny bird-sized thing. We’d have to become something the size of us. Like a baby ostrich” (107). However, given that individuals turn into birds with similar personalities and characteristics, their transformations follow a kind of logic. When they use the invisibility serum, Janie realizes that “no one expects to see a finger or a paper clip floating down the hall, so no one does” (168).