EVERY few years Redmond O'Hanlon finds some poor Unfortunate bastard who, at a low point in his life, has the decision-making powers of a pie of seaweed in the Gulf Stream. Together they end cup in thee Tropics in a place where the local cockroach regards the human eyelid as an ideal Montessori for its offspring, and the scrotum the perfect dining-room round the corner, first turn behind the optic nerve and then straight down south.
In time, the mother cockroach ushers her brood to the host's frontal lobe, where, by a careful destruction of braincells, she can compel her host into completing the next stage in her children's life cycle by having a swim in the Limpopo. There the larvae of the Greater Rottweiler Butterfly swim into a human colon the easy way for a spot of breakfast, and are promptly parasitised by the cockroach nymphs.
The butterfly larvae then return to the forest, where in due course they mature into the unique Rottweiler butterflies, complete with canine teeth and a rarely heard bark of triumph, uttered only after devouring the tongue of an English explorer. By this time, of course, the cockroach nymph has made a leap to a fresh host, though it is not fresh at all it is Redmond again.
But the cockroach's story is only beginning, for now...
Public Reading
There is no point in trying to understand why Redmond O'Hanlon does these things. He is in an odd tradition of Englishmen who explore, and off-air, and at a public reading he is able to give some insight into the motives for this. It is an explanation which causes television and radio producers much anguish and flapping of hands. There are two sorts of Englishman-explorer, he told a small, wet gathering in Bewley's last Friday while he fingered the fetish he brought home from Africa. One sort goes into hot and dry places, the most arid parts of the world and they are homosexual.
The other makes the journey to where it is warm and moist and enclosed in growth and where there is life, and disease, and parasites.
Exploration and sexual preference are not the only symptoms he identified between homosexual and heterosexual males. Take a pool at nighttime, in his garden, and explore it with a torch. Look at the nymphs and larvae scuttling through the depths, and the surface-skimming creatures skating over the water. Are they not fascinating? Heterosexual men agree, he says, and look more closely. Women wrinkle their bows in puzzled amazement and walk away. Homosexual men recoil and cry: "Oh, just gross".
Rainforest Travellers
Simplistic? Very possibly. But do little boys not monopolise rockpools beside the sea? Do girls probe their depths and net their contents? Not in my experience. That obsession with deep, wet round homes is male, and from an early age. So exploring could well be a uterine adventure, to which he and other rainforest travellers compulsively return; it makes sense to some degree. The sexual appetite is serial, after all; why should its metaphor not be so as well? Redmond, The Little Boy At Large in The Rockpool of Life.
Even if one allowed for the success of the metaphor, which of course one mightn't, there is no reasonable explanation why Redmond returns, decade after decade, to essentially identical tropical rainforests, there to enter the foodchain, both as consumer and consumed he feasted on large maggots, a sort of jungle-prawn. and on the honey of bees which drink human sweat (improving the flavour considerably). Anyway, there would only be a limited market for endless sagas of Who Ate Whom In My Last Rainforest Journey.
Work of Bereavement
A broader search is going on here. As indefatigable as his labours are his enquiries. His latest book, Congo Journey, lists more than 200 works in its bibliography; and it is as much a work of imagination, constructed over a period of six years while publishers plucked their hair out and gibbered, as it is fact.
It is also, among others things, a work of bereavement for his friend Bruce Chatwin who died of AIDS and who, as he approached death, was talking to Redmond. "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." And in a way, Bruce got it right. It was not the writing which took six years; it was the construction, for Congo Journey is a ziggurat, with layers taking you in unexpected directions.
Within a page we learn of the recent directive from the dictator of the Central African Republic that pygmies are now to be regarded as humans rather than animals, of the Congo floor maggot, which lives exclusively off human blood, and thence to AIDS, and Bruce, back in England, weakened AIDS and fatally contracting some fungus of the bone-marrow from a cave in China, and finally sleep...
Then awake: "From the head of bed, an enormous, fluffy, white-bellied, grey-backed rat looked at me, frozen, his eyes as wide as mine, his cheeks puffed out, his ears forward, shaped like spoons, his tail white at the end and much too long. We stared at one another, both of us hyperventilating; the fur over his rib-cage pumped in and out; and my heart twitched like a dislodged ball of maggots in my chest." The rat, by the way, was Giant Gambian Rat, which does odd things, even for a rat; such as swivelling and defecating upside down; though on this occasion it vanished, so sparing Redmond a performance of the Acrobats' Great Revenge On Their Audience on the end of his bed, and us a scholarly dissertation on the ballistic properties of rat-poo.
Why do people read Redmond O'Hanlon? For the same reason that he goes to the places that he does - he has one of the great and restlessly inquiring minds of our time, which propels him endlessly to search where scholarship has barely gone before, back to that strange dual-home from which we all emerged, as apes from the trees and humans from the womb.