In his seminal 1862 work, The Excreta of Reptiles in Phithisis etc, a Dr Hastings wrote: "I only seek to prove that the excreta are the most powerful auxiliaries in rectifying the range of corruptions yet discovered."
Perhaps you have never considered the medicinal properties of snake droppings. Yet python flesh was believed to cure tuberculosis, and Pliny, no less, wrote that snake fat, rubbed into the head, was a cure for baldness. Of course, Pliny wrote a lot of things. I suspect the marble busts of Pliny have more waves on top than a stormy Aegean.
Big Snake, Robert Twigger's deeply uneven adventure travelogue-cum-existential meditation, is bursting with similar nuggets of arcane information, the product both of impressively extensive reading for this particular project and of a middle-aged lifetime's general inquisitiveness.
The premise is this: Twigger, having won the hand of his Egyptian fiancee, embarks on one last, great adventure before donning the manacles of marriage. Surfing the Net, he discovers the Roosevelt Prize: $50,000 for the capture - live - of a snake over 30 ft long. Twiggers does some research, decides the best place to look is the Malaysian archipelago and catches the next flight to Kuala Lumpur. Brave man.
But wait. This isn't quite the leap into the dark we might expect. We learn, in fact, through various asides, that our man Twiggers is more than a little familiar with the territory, and actually speaks Malay; that he has travelled extensively, including some years in Japan; that he is an experienced climber, and that he is either independently wealthy or is a member of that once-plentiful English Explorer class which seems able to thrive without reference to income.
Fortunately, the boy can write: his previous effort, Angry White Pyjamas, won the prestigious William Hill Sports Book of the Year award (watch out for the film), and he has also won prizes for his poetry.
It is only Twigger's strength as a writer which holds this mish-mash of memoir, adventure yarn and spiritual introspection together. Yet, even then, his metaphors aren't quite as telling, and certainly nothing like as humorous, as you'd encounter in Bill Bryson's vaguely comparable effort, A Walk in the Woods.
For example, during his first of two main excursions into the jungle to capture his quarry, a reticulated python (so named for its markings), he recalls the evening when one of the local men who accompanied him had to remove a leech from his penis (the local's, that is): "It was one of those airless moments of hilarity, where laughter, bottled up or restrained, has to escape until you're in severe pain". I guess you had to be there.
Ironically, much of the most engaging, humorous and poignant writing comes when Twigger breaks off his tale of the snake hunt and concentrates on the last years of his colourful grandfather, "Colonel H". The term "eccentric" doesn't begin to do justice to the man, a former British army officer who led a local army of Naga headhunters against the Japanese in northeast India.
One constant irritant was the absence of even a general map of the region, let alone a detailed one of the islands on which the hunt for ula besar (big snake) took place.
Twigger's tale ignites properly only in the final quarter of the book, and of course the bold Colonel H is central to the revival. You'll have to find out for yourself whether he bagged the great slithery one; it's just about worth the effort.
Joe Culley is an Irish Times journalist