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Recent years have seen a spate of "Congo books". Ronan Bennett, Barbara Kingsolver and John Edric have written acclaimed Congo novels, and Adam Hochschild's history,
King Leopold's Ghost, documents the atrocities committed during rubber fever, when 8,000,000 died in the Belgian Congo and up to 14,000,000 died in French Equatorial Africa. In the travel genre, we have had Redmond O'Hanlon's great Congo Journey and Michaela Wrong's
In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz. The combination of historical tragedy and contemporary anarchy makes this rich hunting ground for writers, but also provokes serious ethical questions about writing commercial books on a destroyed country--questions which only the nature of the books themselves can answer.
Facing the Congo is the latest such book. In it, Jeffrey Tayler recounts his attempt to canoe the navigable length of sub-Saharan Africa's most symbolic river. Equipped with help from one of Mobutu's henchmen and an ailing guide, Tayler finds things far from plain sailing. Negotiating corrupt officialdom, murderous peoples on the riverbanks, widespread suspicion and the dangers of the river itself, he ultimately finds his plans too demanding to be fully realised.
Tayler's prose is often evocative and his story is a compelling one. But he tends to load his descriptions with adjectives, which can over-dramatise situations. Of course this is a dramatic adventure, and Tayler tells it well, but at the end you can't help feeling that too little attention is paid to the root causes of both his troubles and the current situation in the Congo--rubber fever, greed and a callous European superiority complex. --Toby Green
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From Publishers Weekly
In this Heart of Darkness-revisited tale, Tayler (Siberian Dawn) sets out to retrace the steps of British explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who in the 1870s, accompanied by a crew of hundreds of Africans and three Europeans, sailed the entire length of the Congo River in a pirogue. At 33, Tayler, an American ex-pat living in Moscow, finds himself wading into the murky waters of an existential crisis. Having traveled and lived in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and journeyed across Siberia, he is unable to shake off the wanderlust bug. But his personal crisis runs deeper than whether to find a job and settle down. "The imperative," he writes, "is to accept the frightening yet liberating fact of our finitude... not to succumb to the illusion, comforting though it may be, that our days will go on and on." He makes a final lunge in the hope that "facing the Congo" will create more meaning for him than simply a new adventure. Tayler arrives, however, not in Stanley's 19th-century Congo, but in Mobutu's corrupt and strife-ridden Zaire in the aftermath of the infamous pillaging that tore the country asunder in the early 1990s. Throughout his journey downriver, the author ruminates on the significance of his own life and the history of the Congo and its terrible legacy of colonialism and enslavement, asking what "right" he or any Westerner has to venture, pockets full of cash, into a foreign land stricken with poverty and misery. Eloquent and sincere, Tayler brings immense cultural sensitivity to his journey, fully conscious that the poverty and misery are in large part due to Western hegemony. His story, however, ends abruptly, and his questioning sinks deep into the jungle whence it came. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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