Adventures out of Africa

Press, 21 November 1981, Page 15

Adventures out of Africa

The Midnight Gun. By Berkely Mather. Collins, 1981. 336 pp. $25.95 Bard Stafford, the disgraced younger son of the head of a great Hong Kong trading house, was sent off to New Zealand at the turn of the century with £ 2000 and instructions never to return. He got as far as New Caledonia, bound for what he regarded as “a dull country full of virtuous people,” before he and his money were lured back to China. There he discovered the joys and dangers of running guns up the Yangtse. Then Bard and two unlikely companions were forced to flee again, this time in a Portuguese ship which took them half-way round the world to Mozambique. So it was in the grim last year of the Anglo-Boer War, Bard Stafford, Cambridge graduate and loyal Briton, found himself riding with a Boer commando and finally earning honours from both sides. Although this is said to be the second novel in a trilogy, “The Midnight Gun” stands reading by itself, an adventure story in the grand manner, with a mix of romance and mystery grounded in historical fact, and an engaging panorama of incidents and characters from missionaries in central China to raw Australian troopers on the veldt outside Pretoria. Horn of Africa. By Philip Caputo. Macdonald, 1981. 486 pp. $27.95. North-eastern Africa, where the Sudan and Ethiopia meet, is a land of scorched desert and fierce nomadic tribes, a place said to be known as God’s joke on mankind. To the frontier region, in modern times, comes an ill-assorted trio of men who might have been devised, in another age, by Herman Melville or even Joseph Conrad. “Horn of Africa” is sometimes too slick in its presentation, but its mood stands comparison with “Heart of Darkness” as a mercenary mission to provoke rebellion turns into an epic battle between men and '.he forces of nature. American critics have described Caputo’s earlier book on the Vietnam war, “A Rumour of War,” as “terrifying, powerful and cruelly honest.” The same language might be applied to “Horn of Africa,” although the book is better read as an uncommonly good adventure story, the external and internal progress of three unattractive characters in search of personal fulfilment. It is not a great book, but it passes the test (which many modern novels cannot do) of being read twice in quick succession and of yielding more the second time round. Highly recommended for those who want sand and the stink of death in their bedside reading. Congo. By Michael Crichton. Allen Lane, 1981. 348 pp. $18.95. Michael Crichton won deserved praise for his literary curiosities, “The Andromeda Strain” and “The Great Train Robbery.” Now he has tried an African adventure story, modelled on the form of Rider Haggard, but set in the present day. His expedition to the tropical rain forests has with it Amy, a young femaie gorilla from an American research programme. Amy has a vocabulary of 620 words and a mind of her own. True to its American origins, the expedition is fitted out-with computers, lasers, and a swatch of

ingenious scientific devices, even though it still has to use native bearers for transport as its aircraft become unserviceable. The story just escapes earning the label of science fiction. Unfortunately it cannot escape the criticism of being tedious and excessively didactic. In attempting to set the scenes 1 with meticulous detail, Crichton embarks on digressions about micro-technology, about the speech patterns of animals, and about the structure of diamonds which sit uneasily amid erupting volcanoes, mysterious skull-shattering intruders, and a fabulously wealthy lost city somewhere near the border where Zaire and Uganda meet. Another literary curiosity, but one much less successful than the ingenious Victorian delinquencies of “The Great Train Robbery.”