NEAR the close of his funny, if death obsessed, new book Congo Journey, batural scientist, ornithologist, explorer and world class eccentric Redmond O'Hanlon reports a conversation in which he is confronted by one of the natives who travelled with him. Himself desperate for education and a new life in America, the quiet Manou has decided that O'Hanlon is more African than Western. After all, he carries a fetish and Manou is aware that back home in England, O'Hanlon keeps in a coffee jar the burnt foot of a friend who committed suicide. Manou had heard all about the bizarre contents of Redmond's cluttered Oxford study from Lary Shaffer, the latest of O'Hanlon's line of disgruntled travelling companions "everything in that room belongs to someone who's dead". Much of the rest of the collection, aside from books, consists of stuffed animals or parts of stuffed animals.
Throughout his books O'Hanlon is always being shouted at, ridiculed for his untidiness, his fatness, his insensitivity and his apparent enjoyment of conditions which reduce everyone else to bad tempered, whinging. (These are the sort of people who moan about leeches, filth, stomach heaving food, the constant threat of death - unadventurous ingrates who leave you wondering why on earth they ever bothered going in the first place.)
Sitting in a corner of a Dublin hotel Redmond O'Hanlon is cheerful, physically big and large gestured: one of his most frequent habits is one of appearing to reach up and remove the top of his head as if it were a lid. Covering that lid is the famous hair. Offering champagne from one of two bottles posing in a silver bucket, with all the graciousness of a model host, so obviously an Englishman from another time, he could have stepped from the pages of Waugh. True, he has already reduced his corner to a messy encampment and is accompanied by a carved death totem, a figure draped in a sinister ribbon. The little man is intended to assist selected victims to a slow, painful suicide and each of the 12 knots in the old ribbon represents an unfortunate successfully despatched to the other world.
"Look at this," he announces, displaying a less dramatic looking souvenir, the already famous fetish, one of the stars of Congo Journey. At first glance, it looks like a dead mouse. It is in fact a monkey skin, pouch containing the finger of a dead child whose spirit has been protecting him. Obviously it works, as O'Hanlon survived his mad odyssey. Considering his vivid descriptions of suffering malaria and adventures in which he invariably appears filthy, in caked, stinking clothes festooned with sweat bees, killer mosquitoes and other insects drawn to sweat, blood and the hidden delights of rotting underwear, he looks uncommonly clean leaving Oxford, an excited doctor had said to him that the Congo was very interesting. "It's the HIV1 and HIV2 overlap zone if only you could send me some fresh blood samples, I'd be most grateful." O'Hanlon becomes hysterical with laughter at the memory.
At 49 he has the strong, determined face of a Victorian explorer, an aura enhanced by the long side burns framing it and his round: rimless specs. He enjoys appearing as a likable, if slightly unhinged, professor eager to share his findings. He seems to fill the hotel. The voice is Oxford and the delivery staccato, his approach is certainly stream of consciousness, undercut by his comic sense of explorer as wayward school boy.
O'Hanlon lives in another world, one largely of his own creation - or, at least, he likes to give the impression he does. The success of his previous two travel books has transformed him into a larger than life performer: he is expected to be funny and acts accordingly.
Curiously, those previous, somewhat overrated books, Into The Heart Of Borneo (1984) - which has already achieved classic status - and In Trouble Again (1988), are remembered more for their very English brand of Carry On comedy than for the depth of natural history and fascinating cross references they contain.
But no one who travels through the most dangerous jungles of Borneo, South America and Africa carrying a near complete library of natural science books is content with producing comic accounts. O'Hanlon knows what he is about. Early in In Trouble Again, he reports announcing to Simon (a night club owner he foolishly invites to join him): "We're going to take a 19th century route. And that is my period. I thought we'd follow Humbolgt up the Orinoco and through the Casiquiare; pick up Spruce and Wallace on the Rio Negro; go down to Manaus and join Bates, and then maybe go up the Purus. I've been wobbling round our local wood every morning. I'm fitter than I used to be." Very quickly there is a change of plan. The alternative is equally ambitious: "We're going to try to be the first people to reach Neblina, the highest mountain in South America outside the Andes, via the vast Baria swamp. Then we'll be going down a river that nobody's been down since the 17th century, to try and find a fierce people called the Yanomami. Apparently they hit each other over the head in duels with 10 foot long clubs and they hunt each other with six foot long poles."
Congo Journey is his best book; the darkest, the funniest and the most humane.
It is also the most Victorian, crammed with information, facts, observations. In the midst of any crisis, should an unknown bird flash across the sky O'Hanlon may be relied upon to consult the appropriate reference book, such as a volume of Bannerman's The Birds of Tropical West Africa, and so provide immediate identification.
For his Congo journey, he has assembled his most engaging group of companions to date, including the aforementioned Shaffer, an American academic in remission from multiple sclerosis and a genuine humanitarian. This narrative also reveals far more about himself. By nature an evasive man - evasive in the nicest possible way - O'Hanlon appears to have perfected a clever leave em laughing technique and a conversation with him races from subject to subject, sustained by his interests and anecdotes. Yet Congo Journey contains moments when the reader feels O'Hanlon is only too aware of his remoteness and lack of interest in other people. "You never talked," Manou reminds him. "You didn't say. You - you never talked to me." To which he concedes: "No, I suppose ... no, I didn't. I never did."
"Congo Journey has taken him six years to write. It was late, very late. In the end the publishers took it away from me," he says, giving the impression that masked raiders forcibly removed the manuscript from his home in the middle of the night. "This is the Dutch edition, they were frightfully quick," he says, showing me a copy. "They got it out in about a month and sold 10,000 copies in the first three weeks. But then they've used colour pictures." He likes the Dutch. Having lost his precious fetish in' an Amsterdam hotel - "I really have become very dependent on it", he says, stroking it fondly - "it was immediately forwarded on. First class." No one was going to mistake it for a dead mouse, not in a Dutch hotel. Unexpectedly, the untidiest man in the world then sets about picking up sandwich crumbs from the hotel lounge floor.
O'Hanlon is quick to comment that Jonathan Raban - certainly one of the most outstanding of contemporary travel writers and a superb stylist - told O'Hanlon he personifies the Boy's Own school of travel writing. Even more dismissive was a characteristically sharp put down from another friend, the late Bruce Chatwin who announced theatrically: "Redders! Your hands - they're so soft! I don't believe you ever go anywhere. You just lie in bed and make it all up.
His fascination with the natural world, particularly the world of the 19th century naturalist, began as a schoolboy. O'Hanlon grew up in the privileged, protected environment of a Wiltshire vicarage - privileged in the sense of ready access to learning, not money: his father was a scholarly man with a wonderful library. "My father had been a missionary in Abyssinia in the 1930s." Africa became the focus of the young Redmond's imagination through hours spent in his father's study.
Vicarage life had its drawbacks, one being the frequent, uninvited visitors. "We would be sitting down having afternoon tea and there would be a ring at the bell. My mother would shriek, `I can't stand it,' putting her hands over her head as if they were being invaded. "Then she would sweep out to the hall and I'd hear her saying `Oh, how lovely to see you, we were just speaking about you. Do come in.'"
It sounds very funny, O'Hanlon is a good mimic and enjoys performing. Then he remarks with the ease of one discussing the weather, "I've never really been able to believe people when they say they're glad to see you.
In person and through his books, he often refers to wanting to be liked. "I want to be loved by everyone, even the milkman, everyone." Even more than humanity in general, Redmond O'Hanlon is a mass of contradictions. He is warm and welcoming, a fast, responsive talker - within minutes of meeting him he has issued an invitation to a party in Oxford - and yet you can't help feeling he will have forgotten your existence before you reach the door. Though he appears as a chaotic presence in his own work, there is an awesome deliberation about it. No one could have gone travelling with more medicines - or reference books - than he does. Also, his raids on the wild are juxtaposed between long periods of writing at Pelican House, his home in Oxfordshire where often the only people he sees for weeks on end are his wife Belinda and his two children.
As obsessives go, he is extremely approachable, although he admits he does keep his parents at a distance - "at about loo miles, they're still in Wiltshire: I couldn't write if they were any closer." Agreeing that the 19th century explorer has become the 20th century travel writer, he says, "if is true that there is nowhere left to explore. The best you can hope for is the sighting of a rare or previously unseen species. But the thing about the jungle is its timelessness; you can't carbon date it. The jungle is irretrievably history. There have been no archaeological digs. You don't need artifacts. Being there is almost enough.
The Congo remains the least explored area of equatorial Africa. O Hanlon claims he went in search of Mokele mbembe, the lost Congo dinosaur, allegedly sighted at the remote Lake Tele. It is a place no one wants to go for fear of being murdered by vicious tribesmen fearful of developers, one of who is another of O'Hanlon's companions, Marcellin, the colourful anti hero, a sexually inexhaustible and exasperated Congolese biologist who utters many of the funniest lines in the book.
Before his first expedition - the one to Borneo undertaken in the company of the poet and journalist James Fenton which resulted in Into The Heart Of Borneo - O'Hanlon had already had another life. Winning a scholarship to Marlborough public school - "I was sent there because the place was obliged to take the sons of clergymen, we're supposed to up the moral behaviour of the place" - brought him into even closer contact with practical science. The lab became his favourite place, when among his fantasies was "having personally invented the microscope".
About that time, he had also appointed Darwin and Conrad as his heroes, although his conversation is well peppered with the names of distinguished 19th century European naturalists and explorers, many or whom were in fact amateur scientists who embarked on dangerous trips at their own expense, returning with trunks filled with fossils.
"These men were heroes," he says quietly, intoning the names of Spruce and Wallace and Henry Walter Bates, author of a pioneering, two volume study, The Naturalist On The River Amazons: A Record Of Adventures, Habits Of Animals, Sketches Of Brazilian And Indian Life, And Aspects Of Nature Under The Equator, During Eleven Years Of Travel (1863). "They really did risk their lives in the pursuit of knowledge, they travelled into the unknown.
The best we can do now, or the best I can do, is rediscover the 19th century." Underlying the story of Charles Darwin, who O'Hanlon discovered at 14, is the irony that those who most opposed his theories were the only class, at a time of limited educational opportunities, who really understood his world, the clergy.
Arriving at Oxford in 1965 to read English, O'Hanlon travelled light and legend now claims he carried only a single volume on birds and a pair of Wellington boots. While a student he meet his wife. Courtship was conducted with an unusual amount of psychological cunning for a 19 year old. "I used to arrive and only stay about five minutes. It kept her interested."
Almost 30 years later they are still together: they have two children under 10.
It is interesting to note in Congo Journey, that while the rest of the men spend their time chasing women, O'Hanlon's only emotional attachment is a strange bonding with a demanding baby gorilla which persists in defecating on him.
After a wrong turning with the college authorities, O'Hanlon the student rehabilitated himself sufficiently to take an MPhil in 19th century English studies and was elected a senior scholar in 1971. His doctoral thesis, Changing Scientific Concepts Of Nature In The English Novel, 1850-1920, was completed in 1977. His first book, Joseph Conrad And Charles Darwin: The Influence Of Scientific Thought On Conrad's Fiction, underlined the direction his mind had settled on. Mention of this book inspires him to kiss my hand. "You're the first person to ever ask me about it. I shall send you the book. There are only about five copies in existence. Very rare."
Fittingly, O'Hanlon set off to the Congo in 1989, exactly 100 years after Conrad, a writer he believes "crossed cultures with an astonishing ease. He needed to be an outsider in order to write the books he did."
Before he became the flamboyant traveller, O'Hanlon had served four years on the literature panel of the Arts Council of Great Britain and was natural science editor of the Times Literary Supplement for 15 years. Birdwatching dominated O'Hanlon's waking hours then, and he has never lost his boy's enthusiasm for it. A personal triumph in the Congo was his first sighting of a hammerkop "the bird which has a special place in an older African history": he also saw a pennat winged nightjar. His pleasure was slightly lessened by the exasperated Marcellin, who pointed out that he did not have to risk his life to see one - "to see a bird like that - all you have to do is drive around in a truck".
THE more one learns about Redmond O'Hanlon, the more he emerges as a protected species. Warding off the objections of all who surround him, O'Hanlon battled his way to the forbidden lake and records his first sighting of it: "Suddenly there were flashes of light as if someone was holding mirrors up among the trees ahead, flashes which gradually grew together, became consistent, turned into a layer of life head high between the trunks; and there in front of us was a stretch of water three or four kilometres across, a rest for the eyes, a real horizon for the first time in months." While the others rest, he sets off looking for pythons. In Congo Journey, he has deliberately moved away from the label thrust upon him of travel writer as comedian - O'Hanlon the serious natural scientist has written his most mature book, one which retains his famous humour and achieves a new subtlety.
A self described Darwinian Marxist with an interest in sorcery, he smiles his schoolboy's smile at the photographer, all the while clutching his fetish: he confides knowingly: "It costs a lot of money to put a hex on someone."
