Book Reviews - Review 320

Flemish journalist Rudi Rotthier spends 10 days touring southern England in the company of eccentric adventurer Redmond O'Hanlon. O'Hanlon leads Rotthier to the places where he grew up, including his father's old parishes (the latter was a Church of England vicar), and the schools he attended, including Marlborough.

It's a rather odd concept for a book, but it works well. Anyone familiar with O'Hanlon's writing will have been struck by the sense of great existential disquiet beneath the surface tone of humorous exuberance. O'Hanlon is very much a character in his own works: Congo Journey, in particular, is as much a study of the disturbing psychological effects of being in an unfamiliar and dangerous environment as it is a travel narrative. The Congo emerges as a kind of objective correlative of O'Hanlon's frantic subconscious mind, his attraction to physical danger and hardship a carthartic confrontation with his inner demons.

What this book elucidates is where those demons have their source. O'Hanlon is a garrulous interlocutor who bares his soul to Rotthier, although things are complicated by his raconteur's tendency to exaggeration and embellishment. O'Hanlon's father was a distant and humourless man, and his mother domineering, capricious, and sometimes violent. Unconditional love was not on the table. This, coupled with his school experiences of teachers who were variously sadistic and perverted, and in some cases both, is convincing enough explanation for the depression that has plagued him as an adult. What has kept him going, apart from his work, seems to have been a happy marriage, a supportive cat, and contemplation of the natural world. One senses, though, that these beacons of stability have been very much consolations for his troubles rather than cures.

The most obvious contradiction in O'Hanlon's personality is between a passionate atheism, and a morbid superstitiousness. The latter inspires the "Fetish Room" of the book's title: a secret and private room stuffed with keepsakes of deep personal significance to O'Hanlon, and assumed magic charm. That one of these keepsakes is a jar containing the shrivelled foot of a schoolfriend who committed suicide probably reveals as much as one needs (or wants) to know about the tenor of O'Hanlon's inner life. Of Africa, O'Hanlon asserts, "The role of sorcery was so powerful that you couldn't deny it." Yet he is contemptuous of "western" spiritual mumbo-jumbo - wanting, it seems, to keep his western rationalism pure and safe, and therefore circumscribing his superstitiousness in a purely "African" context.

O'Hanlon's official co-authorship is bogus, presumably decreed by the publishers, but don't be put off by this bit of marketing manipulation: if you've enjoyed any of O'Hanlon's own books, you will find Rotthier's offbeat literary travelogue fascinating. (Incidentally, O'Hanlon relays some interesting and rather indiscreet anecdotes about his famous literary friends, including Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Bruce Chatwin and James Fenton.)

This is an odd book that, like its subject, defies easy categorisation, and is all the better for that.