Just what was Redmond O’Hanlon doing in the Congo? He’s not an explorer—the missionaries and the corporate resource scouts had been all over the remote northern jungles of the Republic of the Congo well before him. He’s not a scientist, though he feels duty bound to ID just about every bird species he encounters, infallibly giving us a couple of sentences describing plumage and behavior. (The hammerkop, with and its huge ungainly nest did make an impression.) In fact, O’Hanlon is curiously lax when it comes to justifying his expedition. He claims to be searching for a dinosaur that has been sighted in a remote lake—a kind of African Loch Ness monster. But he never really does anything with this pretext—neither exploits its farcical potential nor pretends to take it seriously. The lake in question, we later find, is essentially a wide, shallow pond which is in the process of drying up.
If nothing else, of course, he’s gathering material for this book, and the result is a strange mixture of ignorance and incompetence on the one hand, and empathy and insight on the other. There’s a kind of brinksmanship at work, as though O’Hanlon were flaunting his amateurism, demonstrating that the purest motive is no motive at all. How terribly British.
No Mercy is the third book O’Hanlon has written of this type—the first was Into the Heart of Borneo, the second, In Trouble Again, about an expedition to the Amazon jungle. After No Mercy, he wrote one more book—about spending time on a fishing trawler in the North Atlantic—and has been silent since. His modus operandi is to recruit a fellow academic as a companion and then set off for the most inhospitable place possible. I read the Borneo book almost 20 years ago and liked it—I don’t remember a great deal, except that his companion was the poet James Fenton, and that Fenton was reading Anna Karenina as they waded through the swamps of Borneo. This time his companion is an American zoologist named Lary Shaffer. Shaffer is reading Martin Chuzzlewit as they wade through the swamps of Africa. Hmm…
O’Hanlon essentially disregards the history, anthropology, and politics of central Africa. Everything we learn from this book is anecdotal, incidental. Fortunately, the incidents are often astonishing, and O’Hanlon is a good enough writer to capture them in their profound weirdness. O’Hanlon is sort of a myopic writer—he’s good on things that happen within 10 feet of him, not so good on the larger context.
He hires a sort of entourage to squire him around the jungle. The main guide is a man named Marcellin Agnagna, who is both a biologist with an advanced degree (obtained in Cuba) and a native son of the remote country that O’Hanlon and his party traverse. The rest of the posse is composed mostly of Marcellin’s siblings, cousins, and associates (all men). O’Hanlon is a big, rich fish that Marcellin has landed, and it’s appropriate that he share this bounty with his kin.
O’Hanlon devotes many pages to his observations of Marcellin and family. As they make their way first up river from the capital and then through remote outposts and into the jungle, we read about how the members of this crew are constantly searching for young women to have sex with. There may be some insights into the ways and means of Africa in these observations, but mostly they read like a letter home from a shy young university freshman describing dormitory shenanigans. He is also fascinated by the Africans’ obsession with sorcery—he is at times amazed by their superstitiousness, but then manages to acquire his own “fetish” at one point and keeps it on his person at all times. This fetish is a small fur pouch containing what O’Hanlon assumes is part of a human finger.
O’Hanlon writes about his companions as though they were characters in a novel—because he is not in Africa to accomplish or discover anything, his companions are his work, and he depicts them with a novelist’s eye: there is Nze, the great lover, and Manou the sensitive lad with self-esteem issues. But most of all there is Marcellin who is by turns erudite, haughty, whimsical, frightened, and angry. It’s amazing to consider that this is a real person and not just a character in a book—I can even google him and see what he looks like. (He is only ever mentioned online in connection with the mythical dinosaur, the Mokèlé-mbèmbé.) I wonder what kind of book Marcellin himself would write about the months he spent squiring Redmond O’Hanlon around the jungle? Marcellin would seem to have much more at stake than O’Hanlon. O’Hanlon has to worry about keeping good notes, and not running out of supplies or money. Marcellin has to worry about keeping his extended family employed and fed, about his career as a government official and academic, and about keeping the crazy white man alive.
O’Hanlon adopts a baby gorilla in the final part of the book, and in his role as surrogate momma he lets the gorilla cling to him 24 hours a day. O’Hanlon’s clothes are perpetually soiled with gorilla shit as he makes his way back out to the outposts of civilization. Clearly, O’Hanlon is as close to losing his mind by this point as are most of his companions.
No Mercy reminds me of one of those documentaries about a project gone off the tracks—Lost in La Mancha, for example. Except that Redmond O’Hanlon is both the perpetrator of the disaster that we are witnessing, and the witness who is capturing this disaster for us. Depending on which Redmond O’Hanlon you are talking about, the book is either a fiasco or a skillful depiction of a fiasco. Either way, I was ready for this book to end well before it did.
