The ObserverRedmond O'HanlonReviewNaturalist Redmond O'Hanlon's travels round the England of his boyhood make charming if poignant readingIn Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, nature writer William Boot was bottom of the food chain at the Daily Beast. He had the unsexy countryside beat all to himself when he wrote the "Lush Places" column: "Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole". But thanks to a boom in writing about the great outdoors, the questing vole can barely move for prosperous naturalists these days. And now the publishing business has woken up to the fact that one of the masters of the genre has not been heard from during this bonanza – not for seven years, in fact. He is Redmond O'Hanlon, explorer of the Amazon, Borneo and Congo. This is a man acquainted with head-hunters, boiling rapids and even a "globulating necklace of leeches".
Remarkably, O'Hanlon hasn't disappeared in a jungle. No, he's got lost at his base camp in an Oxfordshire village, missing beneath a smothering canopy of books, in a sucking bog of dirty dishes and cat sick. In his masterpiece, Congo Journey, O'Hanlon went in search of a monster called Mokele-mbembe, a throwback to the dinosaurs. But the beast that has been haunting his imagination of late is the black dog.
In therapy, and distracted by bereavement and family illness, O'Hanlon can't or won't write. An indefatigable firm of publishers solve this problem by pairing the 61-year-old with a young Flemish journalist, Rudi Rotthier. He accompanies O'Hanlon on a tour of places from his long-lost past in the south of England, and records the older man's stories. Like the exotic specimens that O'Hanlon once pursued, these are highly colourful, and flit by on wings of gossamer. They cry out to be pressed between the pages of a book. The two travelling companions are bent on game greater and more elusive than anything the ageing naturalist has encountered before. He is trying to find himself. This is Jurassic Park script-doctored by Samuel Beckett.
The publishers go out of their way to emphasise that this is a journey to the dark heart of O'Hanlon's interior. He is "depressed… a stream of jokey anecdotes… offset the bleakness of almost all his memories". You would never guess that they were talking about this funny and charming book. There are good things on almost every page. That said, O'Hanlon clearly suffered during his school days, and it's all he can do to force himself over the threshold of his old halls of learning. His sadistic teachers were no slouches with the cane.
If Graham Greene was right that an unhappy childhood is money in the bank for a writer, O'Hanlon was amply provided for in this respect. He tells his counsellors that he dreams of firing a Magnum .45 at his mother's grave: "I thought that was funny but nobody laughed." He isn't on much better terms with his father, an Anglican clergyman. The life of the unbelieving O'Hanlon has been dominated by two men who studied for holy orders: his father and Charles Darwin. The O'Hanlon family were thoroughgoing creationists, although they added a wrinkle or two all of their own. Redmond's father believed that God had several bashes at making heaven and earth before he got it right, giving up on experiments which had gone off at half-cock, such as dinosaurs and fossils. The vicar and his wife thought that the theory of natural selection was blasphemy. In the garden of an English country rectory, they made a bonfire of their son's science books.
The respectable and the shocking are plaited together as tightly as the blood-sucking neckwear of the rainforest. In agreeable Holland Park, London, O'Hanlon picks up a blackened foot and keeps it in an urn. It's all that's left of his best friend, who has tragically burned himself to death at 21. So begins a lifetime of collecting the charms and familiars that furnish O'Hanlon's gamy den, the fetish room of the title.
But it's not all bad news. O'Hanlon has a bug named after him, and Congo Journey becomes a Penguin Classic. There are good stories about fellow writers, including a row over money between James Fenton and Craig Raine, a pair of gold-plated poets. "Craig once exclaimed at the ugliness of a pylon on Fenton's estate. James answered that he had looked into the matter and that it would cost a million pounds to remove the pylon. He went on to remark airily that he could afford to remove two pylons, which got Craig's back up."
Too much travel literature consists of dry men writing about dry places, drily. The mutton-chopped O'Hanlon, with his unfakeable enthusiasm for the pure beauty of science, is sorely missed. What we need is a wise man, a skilled shaman, to fight his way through the choking undergrowth of O'Hanlon's home, and talk him into making a proper comeback. Does anyone know a good head-hunter?
Stephen Smith is Newsnight's culture correspondent and the author of several travel books, including Cuba, The Land of Miracles and Underground London
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