Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25044
Come Hell on High Water: A Really Sullen Memoir by Gregory Jaynes::(North Point PressL "The Pope," writes Gregory Jaynes at the beginning of Come Hell on High Water, "said man at the end of the twentieth century is afraid." Afraid of what, Jaynes never says, but as he sinks further and further into the abyss of decrepitude, we can only assume he's afraid of himself. A contributing edi tor at Esquire, Jaynes leaves New York City to escape the "snarly things" in his head that make him "upset and petulant" and sets sail around the world in a refitted Russian ice-breaker. Writing as a diarist, Jaynes records his daily woe in a hilarious display of brutal honesty that fortunately never sinks into tedious self-pity. He may be traveling the external world, but his obser vations are internal, recording the neglect, confusion, weariness and even personal growth he encounters from port to port. The ice-breaker he finds himself riding gives him more than his longed-for respite from the world-it serves as personal prison complete with a circus of elderly people who join him in his descent into the human comedy. Dante's circles of hell come to mind, but instead of vicious beasts, Jaynes' purgatory consists of geriatrics like Toxic June, who "buys her friends with booze," and Tennessee Ernie, who talks and talks a muddle of mundanity. His disastrous meals are cooked by a Russian who specializes in roots. "There are now t�n passengers," Jaynes writes, "[and] there is something about every one of us, now that the journey is in its third month, that gets on someone else's nerves." ar, Redmond O'Hanlon's travels through the jungles of the People's Republic of the Congo in search of Mokele-mbembe, a dinosaur that supposedly exists near Lake Tele. While some have criticized the work for following in the footsteps of Rory Nugent's Drums Along the Congo, such harping is akin to complaining that there is more than one history book on a given subject. Both are great. Buy them. Read them. Like so much literature dealing with exploration into the unknown, No Mercy takes its cue from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: the deeper into the unknown he travels, the more bizarre and dangerous his existence becomes as he confronts Self with Other (ie, he is an Englishman in a com munist African country whose Western worldview is repeated ly jarred by the need for sorcerers and protective fetishes). Writing with wit, compassion and an encyclopedic knowledge of the region, O'Hanlon does a masterful job working within this model. He uses the natural history of rare animal and plant species, the social history of the forest pyg mies and their subjugation by other tribes, and the role of chiefs in the jungle as a canvas on which he records his tremendous adventure. Still, danger always lurks. "So he's drowned," the government representative, Marcellin Agnagna, tells him. "This is the best-governed coun try in Africa .... But it's still Africa. Where ·we're going-you'll hear women wailing all day long. If you make a fuss like that every time someone dies, my friend, you won't last. You'll be wasting my time. We won't complete our mission."