Book Review 1: No Mercy

Jeff Meller

9 Oct 13

523 words

With a doctorate from Oxford and 15 years as natural history editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Redmond O’Hanlon has built a reputation as a leading travel writer. He and a friend, Lary Shaffer, set out in No Mercy: A Journey Into the Heart of the Congo to discover the mokèlé-mbèmbé.

O’Hanlon arranges the customary supply of porters and tropical medicines. Equally vital for this journey are alternative medicinals, whiskey, beer, gin, indigenous palm wine, which are administered liberally, starting at breakfast. The effect of this self-medication is exposed early.

O’Hanlon and Lary visit the Ministry of Scientific Research to obtain a permit for the expedition. In the waiting room sits a typewriter. Lary reports that:  “It’s ticking, … it’s a bomb.” From the Ministry, they proceed to a bank. Hanlon goes into the men’s room. While in a stall another gentleman knocks on the door. O’Hanlon swears he has “one of those moments of mystical certainty.… [The knocker] was out there with a pistol in each enormous hand [and] a machete between his teeth.” When the gentlemen enters the stall after O’Hanlon, he wields neither pistols nor machete.

The ticking typewriter and murderous bathroom go-er are figments of the explorers’ inebriated imaginations. The narrator’s credibility is in tatters even before he enters the jungle. But lack of credibility is not the only frailty of this travelogue.

O’Hanlon parades the names of passing fauna without elaboration: “purple-red hawkmoths … were hovering over a patch of tiny scarlet flowers … sucking in nectar through their sharp long...” noses. The reader learns that O’Hanlon can identify a hawkmoth, but knows nothing about what makes the hawkmoth worth knowing.

Other teachable opportunities are so “obvious,” the author cannot bother to teach. On a steamboat traveling up the Ubuntu River the explorers are offered oxtail soup: “[I]n the land of the tsetse fly, the bearer of sleeping sickness … ox-tail-on-the-bone was obviously a delicacy demanding … silence.” The reader is left to wonder how silence helps a diner to detect the unicellular protozoan which causes sleeping sickness.

While short on meaningful description, O’Hanlon is long on irrelevant detail. For illumination at night, Nze, a guide, turns on his “Maglite (black, medium-sized)” and wears a headlamp “(centre-top on his head).”

Dialogue sometimes offers verisimilitude. But here long passages are unlike writing and more like a tape recording, even including cross-speaking. Bakolo, a guide, strolls into camp carrying a crossbow in one hand and a dead monkey in the other. In alternating sentences Lary makes observations about the crossbow and O’Hanlon describes the anatomy of the monkey. The reader is lost, not enlightened about monkey or crossbow.

The last refuge of a striving author may be humor. O’Hanlon’s efforts are bewilderingly puerile: “[I]t seems that the human and chimpanzee lineage may have split as recently as 4.3 million years ago (on a Sunday morning at 10 o’clock, still in bed, in the missionary position….”

The expedition does not discover the mokèlé-mbèmbé, which turns out to be a mythical dinosaur related to the Loch Ness monster. But the reader discovers that gonzo journalism is alive and well and living in Africa.

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Sources:

Redmond O’Hanlon, No Mercy: A Journey Into the Heart of the Congo, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.