CONSIDER this: "... the female hatches her eggs, one at a time, inside her body. She feeds her growing maggot from organs like milkglands via a nipple near its mouth and it breathes through two black knobs on its rear end which stick out from her oviduct. When the larva is fully grown, the mother finds somewhere damp and dark on the forest floor and gives birth - the maggot buries itself, turns into a brown pupa, and one month later the adult fly emerges."
We're talking about the tsetse fly here. Or rather, Redmond O'Hanlon is. The description, from Congo Journey, is but one of many that crowd his latest travel book, confirming him as a superbly meticulous observer of all creatures great and small.
In O'Hanlon are combined two traditions common to a particular strand of the English middle class: the enthusiastic amateur and the bumbling, apologetic expert; a mix of Heath Robinson and that fictional hero so beloved of children, Professor Branestawm.
O'Hanlon projects a winsome charm. His curly hair, owlish spectacles and constant desire for attention conjure up an image of a muddy kneed schoolboy running in from the garden to display, triumphantly, his latest tadpole, insect or giant conker - although here the garden is the rain forest of the Congo, where he goes to track down a dinosaur reportedly living in Lake Tele. He takes with him his regulation laddish companion - in this case Lary, a zoologist from, America who spends most of his time being afraid and thinking about having sex with his woman friend back home. The two negotiate liana strewn forest tracks and Congolese officialdom, drink local beer, eat crocodile meat, read books in bed, hand out Savlon to pygmies and talk to each other in very long paragraphs.
En route, and in the best tradition of the apologetic Englishman, Redmond almost dies of malaria, almost gets lost in the forest, almost discovers the dinosaur. He feelings which rang true, that also wins, almost, another fan - his scholarship is impressive, his talents many, his followers, therefore, legion - but for his constant wittering which eventually begins to pall, so much so that, for the first time ever while reviewing a book, I was tempted to skip 100 pages, only to discover that, somewhere in the middle of them, Lary had disappeared - having nipped back to America and his day job. It was at this point, as he says goodbye to his friend, that I found, buried deep in the book, the only expression of O'Hanlon's didn't demand we laugh and make allowances for this apparently loveable buffoon: "Lary and I gave each other a tight, awkward, Anglo Saxon hug."
O'HanIon doesn't like to be alone with himself - which is probably why his travel companions are assigned the role of a kindly mirror. He crams his book with creatures, many of them human. The latter chase women and want to get rich. Some of them are afraid of the dark. Strangely, since they're Congolese, they have a style of speaking similar to that of any Jack the Lad you might meet in Oxford, O'Hanlon himself being a Marlborough and Oxford man. We meet few women on this journey, although they are talked about a great deal, usually as objects of desire with the author remaining virtuously silent on the subject.
It is the other inhabitants of the rain forest - offered to us free of the protective jocularity that sometimes passes for humour - which we see in all their careless glory: the thousands of tiny white moths with red glowing eyes that settle on his tent; the civets with their dead, black eyes and glutinous, urine smell; the giant butstressed trees hoisted clear of the forest floor by a mass of roots; the African honeybee, the flying squirrels, the sun flickering through the canopy of the forest, and, of course, the tsetse fly. This is what he's good at.
