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Redmond O'Hanlon is an explorer in the nineteenth-century mould. In addition to his four bestselling travel books, Into the Heart of Borneo, In Trouble Again, Congo Journey and Trawler, he has published scholarly work on nineteenth-century science and literature. For fifteen years he was the Natural History editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He lives outside Oxford with his wife and two children.
A pleasant, learned, funny, silly romp through the jungle. On a scientific quest of sorts, British naturalist O'Hanlon and a friend, poet James Fenton, decided to spend two months in darkest Sarawak, traveling from Kuching on the South China Sea to the headwaters of the Baleh River, whence O'Hanlon climbed Mount Tiban (ca. 6,000 feet). Along with three Iban guides (one of whom spoke ingratiatingly fractured English), these two unlikely adventurers - O'Hanlon was fat, Fenton out of shape - endured the most appalling trials from steambath heat, leeches, omnipresent insects, dangerous rapids, and a constant diet of sticky rice and insipid, bony sebarau fish. Happily, the potentially lethal menace of poisonous snakes (or large pythons) and hostile Ukit tribesmen never materialized. The ostensible purpose of this expedition was to determine whether Didermocerus sumatrensis harrissoni, the Borneo two-horned rhinceros, presumed extinct, might not still be in existence. Ultimately O'Hanlon tracks down an ancient Ukit hunter who tells him that in his youth he speared eight such rhinos near Mount Tiban. Our search, O'Hanlon mock-solemnly intones, had ended. But it had been more of a (slightly deranged) lark than a search: O'Hanlon reveling in the world's best reading matter, Bertram B. Smythies' The Birds of Borneo (third edition), as his motorized canoe pushes upriver and stunningly beautiful live birds fly past him; O'Hanlon endlessly twitting his droll, unflappable companion (who spends most of his time reading Les Miserables); O'Hanlon arriving at the remote hamlet of Rumah Ukit and being forced, almost at spear point, to teach the natives the seven-step disco. ( We have already a tape of music and we have a recorder. You have batteries? ) O'Hanlon's readers will be glad he left the comforts of home to dine on monitor lizard tail and get drunk on tuak - and equally glad they didn't join him. Fine light entertainment. (Kirkus Reviews)
