Customer Rating:  
Summary: Editorial murder
Comment: I cannot fathom all the glowing reviews of No Mercy. First of all, the book crams 450 small-font pages into what should have been a 300-page book. Second, it took O'Hanlon over sixty pages just to begin his journey. My editor would have roasted me for that. Then he moves wrenchingly slow, presenting long conversations word for word, describing every single bird in minute detail, describing his boring, lecherous guides, telling of a poisonous snake (Wow!) that a companion killed. I'm not a beginner in true adventure. Give me Krakauer's Into Thin Air, or Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea, but deliver me from O'Hanlon's drivel. I finally had to stop reading about halfway through.
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Summary: Interesting but frustrating travelogue
Comment: _No Mercy_ by Redmond O'Hanlon is an interesting, at times quite good, but for me ultimately frustrating travelogue of the author's journey into the deep interior of The People's Republic of the Congo (not to be confused with Zaire).
The book started out very strongly, recounting the vivid first impressions of O'Hanlon and his travel companion Dr. Lary Shaffer in Brazzaville, consulting a feticheuse (a type of fortune teller), negotiating the complex and tangled government bureaucracy, and trying to arrange an expedition into the deep interior. Why go into the jungles of the country, far up the Congo River one may reasonably ask? O'Hanlon wanted to journey to the remote northern forests of the country, meet the Pygmies, journey by dugout boat to the headwaters of the Motaba River, abandon the boats, walk east through a vast and poorly known swamp jungle, and eventually make his way to a very remote lake, Lake Télé, reported home of Mokele-mbembe, a dinosaur reported to be alive today in the Congo. That's all. Well O'Hanlon did at any rate, Shaffer had evidently planned to leave the expedition before O'Hanlon and his future companions set out for Lake Télé. Shaffer, continually reminded O'Hanlon he couldn't believe he was in the Congo to begin with, let alone heading up the Congo and proceeding on foot through a portion of its dense tropical forest.
His expedition plan sounded quite adventurous to me, if not always accepted by government bureaucrats; one asked, "his voice full of hostility, "you have come to investigate some kind of dinosaur? To make fun of us? To mock the African?" Eventually though permission was granted and O'Hanlon, Shaffer, and several other locals set on their way.
Much of the expedition, particularly early on, was quite interesting, if merely just describing what the author saw. His account of traveling on a virtual floating city, the steamer _Impfondo_ with its attached barges was quite vivid, a town that slowly made its way upriver, different areas of the steamer and the attached barges inhabited by different social strata, of men, women, children, people fishing, selling things, trading with people in dugouts that met the boat from various villages along the shore, sometimes trading for a time, other times tying up and journeying with the entire configuration for some ways. People were born on the boat-barge combination, and unfortunately people died as well.
Unlike many travel writers, O'Hanlon was evidently keenly interested in natural history, particularly birds, and never failed to point out fascinating animals he saw and more interestingly provide good descriptions of them and many times some facts about them. He saw hammerkops for instance, "[a] bird with a genus all its own, its place in science almost as mysterious as its role in myth," at one time thought to be related to herons, flamingos, or storks. Many in Africa leave the hammerkop alone, its very name often taboo, believed to be a sorcerer among birds, able to compel birds of other species to come and build its massive nest. He spied the Congo blue-breasted kingfisher, a "freak of a kingfisher," a species that never goes fishing but rather lives in the forest and makes meals of insects, spiders, toads, and millipedes. A huge rodent, an enormous, white-bellied, grey-backed Giant Gambian rat nearly gave him a heart attack one night as it accidentally made his way into his sleeping chambers one night before bounding out in a panic. He was driven out of another hut by a huge mass of driver ants, moving colonies of ants that according to Shaffer can travel in groups twenty-two million strong, much larger than the "mere two million" that number South American army ant swarms. The author also noted interesting plants from time to time, such as the oil-palm, so vital to many in the Congo region, as oil can be obtained from both the flesh of the nut and the seeds, its oil being used for cooking and in making soap and margarine, its sap collected to make ready-made palm wine.
The book's first half was riveting to me and I looked forward to what new sights would greet the expedition as they went further upriver, leaving the _Impfondo_, proceeding on much smaller boats, and eventually on foot. However, at some point, the book really started to bog down for me. More and more the narrative related the sometimes funny, often just tedious fights, complaints, and bickering of his three local companions, which by the end of the book the reader becomes pretty well familiar with. There is Marcellin, educated overseas, a scientist, but clearly frustrated by many aspects of life in Africa, by the burdens of being a "big man," of out of work relatives feeling that the success of one of their own is their success and Marcellin obligated by societal mores to lets his relatives move in, eat his food, and just make themselves at home. He also seemed frustrated by his African companions, complaining that they were clearly uneducated men, but Marcellin by his words and deeds showing that he was very much a part of that culture as well, as like the others he was continually seeking female companionship every night in every village they visited and while scoffing at some supernatural beliefs, such as fetishes, seemed to accept others (when one friend asked how a local sorcerer who could shapechange into an elephant every night might affect his elephant studies, Marcellin appeared to seriously consider the problem). Manou, another companion, was a much more gentle soul, not as brash or as sex-crazed as Marcellin, but even more frustrated as he would never get the education that Marcellin had and anything he owned was taken outright from him by his elders. While these portraits were interesting they tended to take up too much of the book as it neared its end, overshadowing more interesting aspects of the expedition and were sometimes just plain annoying.
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Summary: Exciting, sometimes shocking, trip by an observant traveler
Comment: "No Mercy" is a very lively, very detailed, very sensitive description of what could have been the trip of a lifetime, though O'Hanlon has taken and written about many adventurous journeys. What I admire most about the book is that O'Hanlon doesn't flinch before any aspect of real life, be it positive or negative, admirable or deeply disturbing. He describes it all, without regard for what is politically correct or commonly assumed.
Great descriptions of flora and fauna. The text is accompanied by excellent photos.
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Summary: The Only Way I'll Ever Get to The Congo
Comment: Another excellent book from Mr. O’Hanlon. I previously read Into the Heart of Borneo and In Trouble Again. This is just as good and just as important. I wondered at first –the start was so abrupt and desultory. But I was soon taken in by the exotic setting, the bizarre but engaging real-life characters, and the curious, almost dream-like parade of events. If this were fiction (and it does read like a novel), an accurate label for it might be magical realism. I am perplexed at O’Hanlon being touted on the cover as ‘By far our funniest travel writer’ and ‘As funny as ever’. Sure there are some very amusing incidents in the book, but why are yaws, malaria, sleeping sickness, abject poverty, and crippling intellectual superstition considered funny? Not to mention bedbugs (in Biblical numbers), Congo floor maggots, driver ants (again in Biblical numbers), HIV and Ebola fever. O’Hanlon certainly does not play up the humour angle. On one level this is a book of horror to me. Stephen King should read it to get fresh ideas. On another level this is a positive, inspiring work. O’Hanlon is good company –he is brilliant, talented, compassionate, and a genuinely good man. So is his American travel-mate, Lary Shaffer. Shaffer had been totally incapacitated with multiple sclerosis in the past and had fought his way back to health. He seems almost super-human at times in his endurance and unflappability. These are people you would be honoured to have as friends. It hurts them to see the suffering and waste in the human beings and animals they see along the journey. They do what they can to help, but two guys with backpacks, no matter how smart or how well prepared, can only do so much. And there is so much to be done. The Congo is such a messed up place.
The Congolese that O’Hanlon travels with are an interesting but mostly unsympathetic group. Marcellin Agnagna, the ‘educated’ representative of the government, is a bullying, arrogant and verbally abusive individual. He says his job is to protect the forest elephants, which are being slaughtered into extinction for their ivory, but his main focus seems to be to fleece O’Hanlon for as much as he can. His secondary focus, which he shares with the cock-eyed, syphilitic Nze, is to copulate with as many young women along the way as possible. O’Hanlon is constantly berated, ridiculed and insulted for being a representative of the white race which enslaved and transported the blacks in the past. No matter that the Bantus in the outback towns ‘own’ pygmies and treat them as slaves right now, in the 21st century.
This is a difficult book to read at times because of what it documents, but you learn so much from reading it. In addition to the wonderful exotic biology, there is much valuable knowledge casually shared between O’Hanlon and Shaffer in their conversations. O’Hanlon also goes off periodically on informative and poignant tangents, such as his last visits with his friend and fellow author Bruce Chatwin, who died in the late 1980s of AIDS. Chatwin’s last advice to his friend was ‘Never kill yourself. Not under any circumstances. Not even when you are told you have AIDS.’
This is a wonderful, honest, magical book. It will make you feel very uncomfortable at times, and glad you have what you have and live where you live. The author went through a lot to bring it to you.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very aptly named book
Comment: Besides the dangers of sickness and loss of life so well reviewed by others, we come to the true brick wall of no mercy at the end of the book when Redmond takes his leave of his African traveling companions (as well as that moment when he is torn from his new gorilla "baby").
There truly is no mercy from poverty that enslaves its captives to hardship, disease and likely early death whereever it strikes in the world as Mr. OHanlon shows us so well. The book has an interesting type ending where the white guy must confront the guilt of being able to leave all this behind while most of those he has grown close with during the adventure cannot.
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