Book Reviews - Redmond O'Hanlon

Redmond O'Hanlon, accompanied by his friend Lary Shaffer, heads into the Congo jungle in search of some mythical lake monster. As usual, his ostensible mission is really a pretext for throwing himself into extreme situations and, incidentally, studying the local flora and fauna.

This is a long book, more slowly paced than Into the Heart of Borneo, and as such it requires a fair commitment from the reader. But it is worth it. Humour is less to the fore than in the early book, replaced by detailed description and - not what one expects in an explorer's yarn - great psychological and philosophical depth. The portrayal of all the characters - O'Hanlon himself, Shaffer, and the trio of Congolese men who guide them on their journey - is exceptionally vivid, giving the book more the flavour of a novel than of a typical travel book. There is a real sense of suspense, with characters slowly being revealed as the team heads into the Congo's own "heart of darkness". In the final part of the book, the border between courage and insanity becomes blurred, and the ending is fitting and subtly dramatic.

So well-structured is the narrative, and so vivid is the dialogue, that one wonders whether O'Hanlon embroidered his story to make it more readable. If he did, I don't think it matters: the sense of the place and of the people is too strong for one not to feel that the book is truthful in its essence. One finishes it feeling that light has been shed on fundamental aspects of the human condition. A unique, quirky and powerful read.

After a journey into the heart of Borneo, out of which came a successful book, Redmond O'Hanlon cast around for a companion on a more ambitious expedition to the rainforest of Venezuela. O'Hanlon's aim was to locate and spend time with a feared indigenous people, the Yanomami, whose men are noted for their hobbies of fighting each other with huge sticks, and massacring the inhabitants of neighbouring villages. Needless to say, there was a shortage of volunteers (James Fenton, O'Hanlon's partner on the Borneo trip, declared, "I would not come with you to High Wycombe"). Eventually, O'Hanlon cajoled a friend, Simon Stockton, into joining him for what the latter evidently imagined would be a relaxing break from his stressful and sometimes violent job as a casino manager.

O'Hanlon arranged with the Venezuelan authorities for a party of Indians to be put together as guides, and for a Colombian biologist, Juan, to join the trip. The group travelled along various rivers in the network joining the Orinoco to the Amazon system, finally heading up the Rio Casiquiare for an encounter with the Yanomami.

The book is in two halves. The first part of the journey is mostly uneventful, and O'Hanlon devotes a lot of space to describing the wildlife. The city slicker Simon becomes increasingly irritable with the heat, the exhaustion, the insect bites, and the lack of "comradeship". After a month he joins some Indians on a trip downriver for extra supplies, and doesn't come back.

With Simon's departure there is an abrupt change in the flavour of the narrative; with his fellow European gone, there is a palpable sense of O'Hanlon's deeper embeddedness in the locality. Despite being unfamiliar with the environment - or perhaps because of this - he is by far the most enthusiastic about the meeting with the Yanomami, which is arranged on a friend-of-a-friend basis with the Indians on the expedition. The Indians are, in fact, nervous about the encounter, but O'Hanlon's thick-skinned enthusiasm wins them reluctantly over.

The observations of the Yanomami make interesting reading; while there are tense moments, the presence of an "intermediary" Yanomami man, Jarivanau, keeps trouble at bay. The Yanomami are not exactly friendly, but they tolerate the visitors despite social faux pas such as failing to share their dwindling food supplies around the whole village. O'Hanlon, as reckless as he is curious, snorts a brain-frazzling hallucinogen that after an initial sequence of seizures and nasal ejaculations induces a sense of clear-headed well-being. The other visitors stay well clear of the substance.

Generally, I enjoyed the second half of the book more than the first. To begin with, O'Hanlon seems a little unsure of the tone he wants to strike, and the narrative swings between hard-man dialogue reminiscent of Martin Amis, and descriptions of local fauna and the landscape which are full of detail but not always as evocative as one might hope - O'Hanlon is a seeker after experience, but as a detached observer, not as a poet. With the decision to find the Yanomami, the tone becomes somewhat more serious and the situations more urgent - there is a foreshadowing of the psychological depth that characterises Congo Journey. Perhaps this is partly because once Simon has left the group, O'Hanlon has the space to paint the characters of his Indian companions more thoroughly. Also, the increasing danger brings out interesting aspects of their personalities that are not evident in the earlier chapters.

In length and ambition, this book falls between Into the Heart of Borneo and Congo Journey. It lacks the relentless humour of the first, and the sustained psychological seriousness of the second. But it offers something of both, and is highly recommended.

Redmond O'Hanlon and the poet James Fenton head up a mountain in Borneo in the steaming equatorial heat, staying with hedonistic natives and followed everywhere by huge butterflies.

It's a long while since I read this book, but what sticks in my mind most about it is that it is one of the funniest I have ever read. O'Hanlon revels in his descriptions of the hardship of travelling in the old-fashioned way, and his portrayal of the effete Fenton is particularly entertaining. But the narrative has a more considered side, too: there are enthusiastic descriptions of the local wildlife, and - as you'd expect - a vivid sense of place.

Into the Heart of Borneo is shorter and less reflective than the later Congo Journey, but there are laughs on every page. O'Hanlon has a brilliant way with words, wringing the humour out of every situation as thoroughly as the sweat from his shirt every night.

For his fourth book, Redmond O'Hanlon had been planning a jungle trip to New Guinea, but the project fell through, and he had to choose a less ambitious adventure, closer to home. He settled on the idea of joining a trawler crew in the middle of winter.

For reasons both practical and economic, trawler captains can't afford to have allcomers on board without good reason, and it took O'Hanlon a year of negotiations and planning to wangle his way onto a boat, the Norlantean. He was to be the nominal assistant to Luke Bullough, a marine biologist who would work on the trawler for free in return for access to specimens of interesting fish. O'Hanlon, useful for nothing but a bit of hamfisted fish-gutting, paid £50 a day for the privilege of joining the crew.

The crew's attitude to O'Hanlon is mostly tolerant. They appreciate his willingness to muck in; and his lack of "sea legs" and his misplaced determination to engage them in intellectual conversation meet with general amusement. One of them assures the author that "we've never had such laughs".

Not that laughs are what life on a trawler is about. The captain of the Norlantean is in debt by two million pounds from the purchase of his boat. Drowning is a certainty if the boat's engine fails or if it turns beam-on to the wind in bad weather.

But the most prominent and unremitting hardship is lack of sleep. For two or three weeks at a time, trawlermen snatch about an hour's sleep a day, and consequently have to take in their stride hallucinations and the weakening of rational thought. Their minds, unable to get proper rest, organise themselves by incessant conversation, and it is this conversation, often incoherent but candid, that provides O'Hanlon with most of the material for his book. Indeed, he shows rather little interest in the practicalities of trawling, focussing more on the lives of his companions: Robbie, a wiry brawler who spent three months in jail for assaulting a pair of police officers ("Prison - I'm telling you, marvellous! A holiday! A hotel for trawlermen!"); First Mate Bryan, laconic and gentle, who worries that he loves his wife too much; and a young man, Allan, whose life unravelled after he inherited a fortune but couldn't handle the freedom and spent the lot, leaving a trail of problems and complicated commitments behind him. He had to return to the trawlerman's life he thought he'd escaped for good.

For this reason, Allan is the most embittered and belligerant of the crew, and in a scene that O'Hanlon makes the book's climax, he launches into a tirade against the author with a penetrating analysis of his motivation:

O'Hanlon is so hurt that he escapes into a sudden access of sleep, planting his head onto his dinner plate. There is something touching about the author's childlike candour in recounting this incident, and in his almost pathological desire to be liked and cared for by his companions. Trawler is as much about him as about the trawlermen, and the book has in common with his others a distinct confessional quality.

It must be said that Trawler is written with less discipline and wit than O'Hanlon's earlier books. It is fascinating and often poignant, but conversations are recorded at excessive length, there is much waffle and digression, and there is little sense of what work on the ship was like, or of the passage of time - the reader isn't clear whether the book records two days at sea, or two weeks.

The dialogue, too, sometimes does not ring true, though this may partly be due to O'Hanlon's overuse of italics, a technique presumably intended to increase the sense of urgency and drama, but that merely makes the characters sound like those in a Marvell comic strip.

The reader will become well-versed in the subject of fish, thanks to O'Hanlon's and Luke's long discussions of piscine biology - if rather less well in how to catch them.

Trawler is a readable book that, at its best, says a lot about human nature in the face of adversity. It couldn't have been written by anyone other than this eccentric depressive thrill-seeker.