No Mercy

Redmond O'Hanlon

It's easy to fool yourself into thinking, war aside, there are no truly hard to visit corners of the world left. Redmond O'Hanlon's story of his 1990s expedition up the Ubangi river in the Congo (not the bigger, Zaire-as-was, Democratic Republic Of but the smaller, People's Republic Of, next door) reminds us that there are. It's a supremely poisonous environment, from the threat of disease, through to dangerous insects and animals, through to the risk of getting caught in feuding between neighbouring jungle villages.

The purpose of the expedition is ostensibly to seek out a dinosaur-like creature supposedly sighted several times in the furthest reaches of the Congo jungle but as yet unknown to modern science. Equatorial Africa's Loch Ness monster, if you like. But you get the impression that all O'Hanlon really wants is an excuse to poke about a bit in the Congo until his money runs out. Which is how the book reads. The book is long, detailed and richly varied with very little sense of the original dinosaur-shaped objective. Indeed, O'Hanlon does wind up at the end, delirious with some kind of bug and broke and living on whiskey and porridge oats and utterly untroubled by his failure to sniff out so much as a dinosaur turd.

If it's taken me a long time to get through it then that's only because it's not the kind of book you can read for long stretches. It's a sumptuous feast of a book, a blend of natural history, zoology, botany, biology, travelogue, history, racial politics, environmental politics, religion and humour. It's partly serious and it's partly whimsical. I think it's truly one of the great works of travel literature.