Room for Fetishes

Redmond O’Hanlon and Rudi Rotthier, The Fetish Room: The Education of a Naturalist (Profile Books, 2011), 224 pages, £12.99 

With his mutton-chop whiskers and snowy-white hair, Redmond O’Hanlon looks like everybody’s idea of the retired nineteenth-century naturalist. In thirty years, he has written some of the most colourful, funny and archly mischievous travel books around. His Congo Journey (1996), an account of a six-month trip through the northern Congo basin rainforest, is now a Penguin Classic, although equally of interest are Into the Heart of Borneo (1984), an expedition up the Rajang river in Sarawak with the poet James Fenton (who told O’Hanlon when he tried to entice him to join him on a later Amazon expedition, “I wouldn’t come with you to High Wycombe”), and the sleep-deprived, “unhinged” (O’Hanlon’s word) vistas of the North Sea in Trawler (2003). He resembles the British zoologist Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who began his famous account of Scott’s Terra Nova expedition to the Antarctic in 1911 by observing that “polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised”: his book was titled The Worst Journey in the World (1922). Cherry-Garrard was after emperor penguin eggs; O’Hanlon is usually “after something” too—the rare Sumatran rhinoceros in his Borneo book—but the prize often slips away unnoticed in the heat of the writing, never having been what it was about in the first place. He also gets to keep his clothes on at times for as long as a polar explorer, although it may be assumed his underwear doesn’t get freeze-dried and blanched by the prevailing weather.

In the Netherlands, O’Hanlon has long enjoyed cult status. Rudi Rotthier, a younger Flemish travel writer, was dispatched by a couple of enterprising Dutch publishers to spend two weeks with him; and The Fetish Room is the result, a journey into the heart of a writer (though one might feel that this hypostatic shorthand for a tremendous and troubling revelation has, ever since Conrad’s novel made it famous, been rather overdone). Sixty hours of recordings have been condensed into what reads like an extended interview, with scope for explanations and interjections from the admiring—but certainly not uncritical—younger writer. He ought to take full credit for editing the looping dialogue which O’Hanlon merely fact-checked. As a foreign visitor Rotthier can walk all over the class-lines that immediately lead a British person, as O’Hanlon claims, to pigeonhole him as a member of the upper middle-class and bracket him accordingly.

One of O’Hanlon’s specialties is to terrify his readers (and presumably himself first) with lists of dire local diseases while hinting at the untold natural perils lying in wait for the unwary: these include parasitic worms, pit vipers, wild-boar ticks, thread leeches and assassin bugs—although common mosquitoes are probably the greatest menace of all. It is a discomfiting thought that Nature in all its amazing diversity is going to try at some point to exploit even the gentle author as a primary resource. The genre is sometimes called “horror travel”, and suggests why O’Hanlon has been compared with Hunter S. Thompson, another writer willing to go to extremes for the sake of writing about how he survived them. Sometimes the sheer variety of nastinesses he lists seems to serve as a distraction from the fact that there is a nugatory quality to contemporary travel writing: the Victorians (as well as working in the service of the British Empire) faced real dangers and privations that, in some cases (Shackleton, for example), brought them very close to death. Often the most fuss they made about their imminent demise was to sing hymns to drown out the sound of the storm and yearn in their diary for a tin of peaches.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Charles Hose explored and exposed as its colonial administrator the fetidly lush interior of Borneo (The Field-Book of a Jungle-Wallah, 1929), leaving his name on several species of mammals and amphibians as well as the mountain range in the island’s centre. Joseph Conrad (subject of O’Hanlon’s doctoral thesis and his first book) kept a copy of Alfred Russel Wallace’s Travels in the Malay Archipelago beside his bed: now there was a truly intrepid man. Wallace, like many of Conrad’s heroes, never thought about using his entrepreneurial talents to his own advantage: he also quite happily deferred to Darwin as elder and more eminent naturalist even though he too had a solid claim to be the originator of evolutionary theory.

O’Hanlon for his part has never pretended to be especially intrepid: he is always being saved by more clued-in or competent companions—or by sheer luck. He likes to play the fool in the most improbable situations. And he certainly has the gift of the gab: Rotthier even has a Boswell moment when a New Yorker journalist drops in for a brief interview with O’Hanlon and he finds himself unexpectedly becoming jealous, only to make the mordant discovery, as the afternoon wears on, that everyone gets to hear the same stories. Timing is all.

The most striking feature of Rotthier’s trip to O’Hanlon at home (Pelican House) in Oxfordshire is its comically humdrum pace. The odd couple visit the wilds of Wiltshire, Dorset and Kent. They stop in Calne, where O’Hanlon spent a largely unhappy childhood, and at Marlborough College, the school from which he claims he was expelled for riding a motorbike on the campus. Much time is spent at the local pub, downing pints of Old Tripp and talking about his early life and gifted friends—Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis e tutti quanti. A new genus of clerid beetle has been named after him by an American entomologist: Ohanlonella esperanzae. His wife Belinda, who has just come out of hospital, and his children Puffin and Galen, have cameo roles, mostly to rescue O’Hanlon from unwashed dishes and other pile-ups. Belinda’s dressmaking business kept the family afloat in the early days.

O’Hanlon’s academic career petered out when it was discovered that he was teaching his students the works of the wrong century (although he has been happily editing natural history books for the Times Literary Supplement for many years now). Other shortcomings include being unable to read a road map. He is also undergoing analysis (recurring nightmares arrive like bad weather in his travel books), which seems to have much to do with the casual cruelties of his histrionic mother and narrow-minded Anglican clergyman father when he was young: on one occasion while his father took him out to lecture him over lunch on his wayward ways his mother sneaked into his apartment and made a bonfire outside of all his books (“vile, indecent, an absurd waste of time”) except for Wordsworth, whose works he has naturally been unable to read since.

O’Hanlon is determined to be in holiday spirits, but it’s clear his life is a bit messy. He can only marvel at the productive regularity of Charles Darwin’s when their trail takes them to his property, Down House, in Kent. Never trained formally as a biologist, Darwin gathered his vast orders of evidence slowly and in an impressively expansive way, in constant discussion with both learned authorities and practical people whose knowledge of nature had no origin in books.

Darwin had his dark days too, and recorded the symptoms for years after his Beagle voyage of what O’Hanlon thinks was a psychosomatic illness. Cherry-Garrard, too, suffered from depression after returning from Antarctica, where many of his friends had perished; his therapy was to write The Worst Journey in the World. Rotthier catches the scent of something compulsive in O’Hanlon’s own nature when he discovers his trophy den—the fetish room of the title. Since childhood, O’Hanlon has been collecting relics and objects of interest for what American Indians would recognise as a “sweat lodge”: a place he goes to recoup his forces in preparation for writing. Along with his childhood bird-shells and the paraphernalia of stuffed animals and preserved insects—shards and relics of the bellum omnium contre omnes that Darwin’s work (dare one say) helped to fetishise—are the remains of his friend Douglas Winchester who burned himself to death aged twenty-four when they were students together at Oxford: a few tatters of his foot now reside in a Maxwell House coffee jar. It is hardly a surprise to read that having carried a fetish for protection throughout the expedition recounted in Congo Journey O’Hanlon was eventually taken by the native bearers to be a kind of sorcerer himself.

O’Hanlon is clearly exercised by, as well as being at loggerheads with, the basic attitudes and assumptions his piously unfeeling parents left on his doorstep—one of which was clearly a Puritan anxiety about idolatrous habits and the true nature of the logos. The Fetish Room recognises on the other hand that the category of what is called “performative utterances” has become ever more crucial to our supposedly rational world, even in the realm of science. The whole of the Western world—with its confusion about the boundaries of reality and fantasy, faith in the image, and devotion to the accumulation of electric money-tokens—is a kind of fetish room, and seems to have wholeheartedly embraced the kind of thinking colonialists once thought they were getting rid of for good. And writers are just as busy as anyone trying to manipulate hidden agencies in order to feel “invincible” (O’Hanlon’s word) in the marketplace. (In a commodified society, all kinds of things acquire anthropomorphic attributes, not least rationality.)

O’Hanlon anticipated this muddle of idealism and materialism at the very outset of his career when he referred, in the gloriously incongruous setting of the Sarawak jungle, to the “universal fetish-philosophy of the events of life”. That phrase came from a scholarly text by the Victorian anthropologist and cultural evolutionist E.B. Tylor—who believed “research into the history and prehistory of man […] could be used as a basis for the reform of British society”—and it is gone before you properly register its presence, like the brightest blue-banded kingfisher (Alcedo euryzona) in the mighty hanging gardens of the Rajang.

Note: O’Hanlon seems to have put well behind him the dudgeon that occasioned The Fetish Room. Last year he completed an expedition on board the Dutch clipper Stad Amsterdam courtesy of the Netherlands broadcaster VPRO in order to celebrate the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species. Following HMS Beagle’s route around the world, from Plymouth to Salvador de Bahia and the Galápagos and Australia, it afforded O’Hanlon the particular pleasure of reliving what he calls “the most important voyage ever made”. His brilliant extemporising can be seen and heard on various footages on the internet.