Redmond O'Hanlon

Redmond O'Hanlon was for many years the Nature Books editor of the Times Literary Supplement — a background that gave him a more systematic knowledge of natural history than most travel writers, and also a certain kind of donnish comedy that he deployed against himself remorselessly.

Into the Heart of Borneo (1984) began the series. He and the poet James Fenton travelled up the Baram River to find the Penan people and the hornbills, and the comedy arises from the gap between O'Hanlon's genuine expertise in Victorian natural history and his complete practical incompetence in any actual jungle. He reads Darwin to the crocodiles. He has encyclopaedic knowledge of the specific diseases he might contract. He is frightened of nearly everything and persists anyway.

In Trouble Again (1988) took the same sensibility to the Venezuelan Amazon. Congo Journey (1996) was darker — deeper into the forest, further from comedy, closer to genuine danger.

His writing is heavily influenced by Victorian natural history — he reads Bates and Wallace on the spot — and the comedy comes partly from the collision between that literature and what he actually finds. He is genuinely a naturalist, not merely a person who likes nature, and the species-counting that would be dry in a guidebook is alive and funny in his hands.