The New Noah by Gerald Durrell

The New Noah
by Gerald Durrell
Viking Press, 1964 (originally published in 1955)
223 pages

This was an odd one, in that I started reading it and thought two things: first, I've read about these trips before, and not when I was a kid, but rather more recently; and second, the last time I read these, they were written better. It was weird. And then I read the dust jacket, and realized that the advertising was all right there -- these were, indeed, retellings of previous adventures, but primarily aimed at kids. Once I had that all sorted, I could enjoy the book for what it was. Sort of.

I believe I have mentioned before a number of things I like about Gerald Durrell's writing -- his enthusiasm for nature, his desire to share the quirks and amazing things about the animals he meets, and especially his eloquence when it comes to describing settings, and his sharp and self-deprecating sense of humour. Some of that was still in evidence here, but in taking his "best" stories from the earlier books and editing them for a younger audience, we really only got the first two, with rare glimpses of the third and fourth -- he's telling animal stories, and he's shortened them, and they're considerably less incisive and/or amusing than their counterparts written for adults. They don't sparkle in the same way. The language is simpler, the stories shorter, the sense of adventure and danger and occasionally sorrow or outrage just doesn't show up. Chumly the Chimp (remember him?) makes an appearance and gets most of a chapter -- an unusual thing for any single animal in this book -- but the sadness of the story has vanished. Chumly's ignoble and tragic end isn't mentioned, isn't even alluded to. Perhaps this was considered too distressing for children to hear? Durrell uses this volume as a bit of a platform for discussing the life of an animal collector, but doesn't quite hit the same note that the previous three do: the acknowledgement that collecting fauna for zoos is as much hard work, pain, disappointment, and frustration as it is excitement and success. The book is significantly poorer for the lack of balance and depth.

It is possible that this book would be a better entree to Durrell's oeuvre. I think because I am familiar with his better stuff -- his "real" books, as it were -- this was not a terribly good choice for me.

Complaints aside, it's still fun to read these stories, truncated and disjointed as they are, and it's a very fast read. The stories are short and amusing even without the sparkle of wit and vivid description, and the little bits on his trips to Guiana, Argentina, and Paraguay have certainly whet my appetite for the next book in my quest to read all his autobiographical animal tales. Though it also became clear to me that I've read The Drunken Forest before -- I remember the story about Amos the Anteater well, including the bit where the gaucho's wife rides out on the back of the draft bull to pick up the aforementioned creature. And the tale about the musical capybara was one of the better and funnier tales in the book.

Only recommended if you haven't got any other Durrell to read, and absolutely need a fix. I suppose if you wanted to get a kid an early Durrell book that didn't include any unpleasant colonial English white male overtones, you might do well with this, too. The stories focus on the animals almost exclusively, so some of the parts that are not so desirable about his earlier books are absent here. However, as an adult reader, too much of the wonder and beauty and balance of his first books is absent too; I won't feel the need to read this one again.

Other Durrell books reviewed here so far:
1. The Overloaded Ark
2. Three Singles to Adventure
3. The Bafut Beagles

The Bafut Beagles by Gerald Durrell

The Bafut Beagles
by Gerald Durrell
Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954
232 pages

I find this book a little hard to review. It is third in my quest to read all of Gerald Durrell's autobiographical animal stories, and I am glad I read it; it had moments in it I would have been sorry to miss. The man writes beautifully. He has a great turn of phrase, a beautiful knack for description, and a dry, self-skewering sense of humour. These early books of his, at least, are a rich tapestry of love of place, love of animals, and deep curiousity about the world around him.

The Bafut Beagles, though, is a product of its historical moment; published in the early 1950s, the edition I have from the library is a first printing. He spends a lot more time here documenting the people around him than in the previous two, and not always to his credit in a contemporary light. As stated before, I do think that Durrell was likely extremely progressive given his station (a well-enough-off white British male) and I do think he had a healthy dose of respect and affection for the people he met and worked with in the British Cameroons; one realizes this as one reads, and it is quite clear. One also gets vaguely uncomfortable as one identifies a very faint paternalistic colonialism and a definite streak of sexism that rears its head every once in a while. I found it particularly jarring in The Bafut Beagles, thanks largely, I think, to one rather ugly incident that Durrell relates and plays a bit for laughs (though he is laughing at himself, mostly, and his own romantic colonialism, I think). I think also it's because he did spend less time talking about the animals, which is what I read for anyways. That said, as before, I was reading it knowing that it is a snapshot of a fascinating profession in a particular time, and so I was able to enjoy the best parts of the book, and move past the parts that occasionally made me cringe.

It does make me wonder if, when I was reading some of these books for the first time (this was not one of them; of the three I've read so far, only Three Singles to Adventure was a reread) some of the historical tenor of them was present but I missed it, or whether it was removed for political correctness in later editions (I am not sure how I feel about this), or whether his underlying, and (I suspect strongly) unconscious, attitudes changed as the times did -- most of the others of his that I've read were from the late 60s and 70s.

Anyway! As always, my favourite parts of this book were to do with the animals, and particularly the parts in which he is describing a behaviour or a proclivity that a particular animal has, rather than a capture. The simple pen-and-ink illustrations that accompany the text are actually quite helpful in showing the physical characteristics of the animals Durrell describes. He is clearly fascinated -- enamoured, really -- by animals in all of their forms, from the tiniest insects to the largest predators, and it shows. I think part of the reason I didn't like this book quite as well as the first two is that there was less of the animals than there had been previously. He is at his strongest, writing-wise, when he is talking about them, too.

I won't recommend this book, even in Durrell's canon, but I'm not sad to have read it, if that makes any sense. I think it could have been skipped comfortably and I wouldn't have missed too terribly much. It's an interesting read both for the intended subject matter and as an historical exercise, but reader beware, that's all. Aside from my squirming, politically correct caveats, I just don't think it's as strong a book as the previous two in the chronology.

The next book in the chronology is The New Noah, a book I can find very little about. I'm not even sure if I can find it, period, but I'll do what I can and I'm interested to see where -- and when -- Durrell takes me this time.

Other Durrell books reviewed here so far:
1. The Overloaded Ark
2. Three Singles to Adventure

Three Singles to Adventure by Gerald Durrell

Three Singles to Adventure is the second in my somewhat daunting attempt to read all of Gerald Durrell's autobiographical books. I've read this one before, but it was years and years ago, and it wasn't until I was most of the way through that I remembered at all. There were a couple of stories that tweaked my memory; but otherwise it was like a fresh read for me.

This book starts out promisingly, with four men in a bar in Georgetown (in what was then British Guiana, and is now simply Guyana):

"Well sir," he began, in his incredibly cultured voice, "I think you'd do well if you went to Adventure."

"Where?" asked Bob and I in unison.

"Adventure, sir," he stabbed at the map, "it's a small village just here, near the mouth of the Essequibo."

I looked at Smith.

"We're going to Adventure," I said firmly. "I must go to a place with a name like that."

Which would totally be my reaction, too. Thus begins a book that sometimes felt like it was so close to home I could have written it. Sometimes. Overall this book is just as entertaining and enlightening as The Overloaded Ark. I'm not going to go into my discussion of the discomfort-inducing colonialism that I did in my review of that book, but suffice to say that it was certainly present here too at times.

It also contains hints of the same enthusiastic description of place that I loved in The Overloaded Ark, although one does get the feeling that the jungles of Guiana weren't as eye-opening or as beloved as their African counterpart -- that, or Durrell had a stiffer word count, and I can't quite decide which. Three Singles to Adventure just didn't seem as richly descriptive as I had hoped, although what it lacks in description of place it makes up for in natural history tidbits. In particular, Durrell goes into a detailed (and humourously scathing) repudiation of the "common knowledge" about sloths, mentioning offhand how he's nearly sliced from ankle to hip by the two-toed variety somewhere inbetween discussing their virtues. Or take this passage, about the noble capybara, the largest rodent in the world:

This enormous rodent is a fat, elongated beast clad in harsh, shaggy fur of a brindled brown colour. Since its front legs are longer than its back ones, the capybara always looks as though it is on the point of sitting down. It has large feet, with broad, webbed toes, and on the front ones the nailsare short and blunt, looking curiously like miniature hooves. Its face is very aristocratic: a broad, flat head and the blunt, almost square, muzzle giving it a benign and superior expression like a meditative lion. On land the capybara moves with a peculiar shuffling gait or a ponderous, rolling gallop; but once in the water it swims and dives with astonishing ease and skill. A slow, amiable vegetarian, it lacks the personality displayed by some of its relatives but makes up for it by a placid and friendly disposition.

Can't you just picture it? Durrell introduced me (in this book, I think) to the capybara when I was a kid, and for a long time they held an almost mythic status in my mind. I couldn't quite believe there was something quite like a real capybara in the world, and for years I wasn't sure whether they were real, or if they were, whether they still existed in the wild. I know now that they do, in numbers no less, but I'm still inordinately fond of them, thanks largely to Gerald Durrell. If I ever see one in the wild, the squeeing will be heard in Antarctica.

The story that reminded me that I'd read this book before, though, was the story of the pipa toads and their "birth" in a kerosene tin halfway across the Atlantic Ocean, and the five fascinated sailors who preside, along with Durrell, over the event. I can't reproduce it here (it's a chapter long) but it encapsulates everything I love about nature, human nature, and nature interpretation -- I related so closely to it and recognized that I got into outdoor education largely because of the type of wonder and connection Durrell describes in this chapter. He captures it perfectly. And it made me a little sad that I never did have the chance to meet him, or even write to him. He was the sort of person I would really have enjoyed, even if I was too tongue-tied to speak when he was in the room. (Yes, I would have been. I don't react well to Authors; they make me nervous because I am in awe.)

The next book in the timeline is The Bafut Beagles which I know for sure I have never read. I would remember a title like that.

The Overloaded Ark by Gerald Durrell

I am managing to peel myself away from my next read for long enough to write this review. It's not that I don't want to recommend The Overloaded Ark; quite the opposite, in fact. But my next book is really, really good and very gripping, and I've been having the privilege of multiple consecutive uninterrupted hours to read it.

But enough about other books.

The Overloaded Ark is the first of a great number of autobiographical tales written by Gerald M. Durrell. Many years ago, in my pre-teens and teens, I read everything by Durrell I could get my hands on. Which I am realizing wasn't that much, looking at his bibliography. I'd never heard of The Overloaded Ark, but I was feeling nostalgic the other day, so I looked up Durrell and settled on reading all his autobiographies, in publication order.

To understand this book, I think it's really important to first put it in context. Durrell went on several "collecting" expeditions for British zoos in his life. As far as I understand, this sort of expedition just doesn't happen anymore and for very good reason. It's not considered good zoo behaviour to be sending minions out to pull live specimens out of their habitat, unless it's to establish captive breeding programs for a seriously endangered species. But back in the 1940s, when Durrell's first expedition took place, it was a commonplace activity. And as Durrell says in his prologue, part of what he is trying to do with this book is set the record straight -- collecting expeditions were neither unending drudgery nor unending danger.

The time period is part of what makes this book so fascinating, but it also causes some serious cringing on my part. There's overtones of -- and sometimes overt -- racist colonialism and even hints of sexism, all of which at the time would have been considered normal for a white, British man visiting British Cameroon at the time the book was written. Much of the time I think Durrell was ahead of his time as far as racism and environmental concerns, but sometimes he'll write something really jarring in an otherwise splendid book. So my suggestion would be to read this book, but read it with the historical context in mind. It doesn't make any of the colonial overtones right, but it is an interesting historical exercise to read this book and realize just how deeply embedded some of this objectionable stuff was in society.

Moving past the issues (which I will admit was, for me, very hard to do at first; I don't read a lot from this time period and so it was an exercise in not being massively put off), Durrell is underrated as a writer, I think. His style is poetic, often quite funny (usually at his own expense), and thoughtful. He wants his readers to fall in love with the African jungle, and with passages like the following, how could I not?

The most notable feature of the forest was the innumerable tiny streams, shallow and clear, that meanered their way in an intricate and complicated pattern across its floor. Glinting and coiling around the smooth brown boulders, sweeping in curves to form the snow-white sandbanks, busily hollowing out the earth from under the grasping tree roots, shimmering and chuckling, they went into the dark depths of the forest. They chattered and frothed importantly over diminutive waterfalls, and scooped out deep placid pools in the sandstone, where the blue and red fish, the pink crabs, and the small gaudy frogs lived.

He has a turn of phrase that is both dryly amusing and wonderfully descriptive, as when describing a bicycle trip he takes with one of his assistants sitting on the handlebars, where they "shot out onto the high road like a drunken snipe." Or that section I mentioned in my teaser, with the naked ant battle. Actually, Durrell seemed to have a number of naked encounters... another one I laughed at went as follows:

It stood quite still, regarding me thoughtfully, and the tip of its tail moved very gently among the grass stalks. I had seen domestic cats looking like this at sparrows, twitching their tails, and I did not feel very happy about it. Also, I was stark naked, and I have found that in moments of crisis to have no clothes on gives one a terribly unprotected feeling. I glared at the Serval, wishing that I had my shorts on and that I could think of some way of capturing it without the risk of being disembowled.

Because yes, Durrell goes to some enormous lengths to catch his critters. It's always top of mind -- even when staring down large cats, or faced with a Gaboon Viper (a rather deadly snake, as he might say) in his living quarters, or falling down a hillside onto the back of an enormous Monitor Lizard which has already taken a nasty strips out of a dog. What amazes me most about this book, though, is that one never ever loses sight of the fact that Durrell loves these animals. He loves the forest, he loves the flowers, the beetles, the birds, reptiles, mammals -- he loves it all. And to him, capturing and attempting to keep these animals alive is part of loving them. One doesn't have to agree with his methods, but I know that love of nature. I have it myself.

He includes a couple of notes about failure, too. He's very conscious of mentioning that though he's included the exciting bits in the book, most of his time on a collecting trip is spent in animal care. And much of that is quite boring. He also tells us where things go wrong, as with animals he simply can't figure out how to keep alive in captivity; and there's one really lovely, touching chapter about Chumly the chimpanzee. It's a very sad story, and he never lays blame or points fingers for Chumly's demise, and leaves the conclusions to the reader -- and this reader came out feeling really horrified by human stupidity and laziness.

There are a lot of things about this book to recommend it, if you are aware of the time period it's written in and prepared to take that as it comes. I am going to continue with my plan to read Durrell's autobiographical works in order, but I'm also thinking I might throw his book The Stationary Ark in there as well, in which he talks about zoos and their relationship to the natural world, and his philosophy of effective and ethical zoo management. I've never read it, but heard good things.

If you're reading Durrell for the first time, I don't know that I'd start here. It's his first published novel and it's not quite as polished as some of the others, although at points it is really, blindingly beautiful. So, very recommended, with caveats.