REVIEWED BY DAVID VINEYARD:         


MIKE BOND – The Last Savanna. Mandevilla Press, paperback, 2013.

   Sunlight had fled to the upper eastern slopes. To the north, across vast, empty Suguta Valley, the sky shifted steadily from cobalt to blood and lavender; doves called from the candelabra euphorbias, “And you too? And you too?” A honeyguide fluttered past the doum palm, alit on a higher branch, and cocked its head expectantly down at the Samburu. “Come with me!” it twittered. “Honey! Honey! Come with me!” A string of puffball cumulus trooped across the eastern sky, nose to tail like elephants, sunset reddening their flanks, as if they’d been rolling, as elephants once did, in the ochre desert dust of the Dida Galgalu.

   Mike Bond’s The Last Savanna more than satisfies two of my favorite genres, the African novel and the classic adventure story as pioneered by the likes of Buchan and brought to its high point in the Post War era by writers like Hammond Innes, Victor Canning, and Elleston Trevor.

   Bond has been writing for a while and producing books of classic adventure that are both modern in voice and story, and beautifully written in prose both as hard as the men he writes about and lyrical as his finely realized settings with titles like Killing Maine, Holy War, and House of Jaguar.

   At issue in this one are the horrors of post Colonial Africa, torn by poverty, war, terrorism, and uncertainty. The plot follows three people, McAdam, a former SAS soldier turned protector of wildlife and hunter of the poachers who are destroying the legacy of African wildlife and funding terrorism with the money they make. Rebecca is a white woman McAdam will encounter as the hunt for the poachers tightens, and one he falls in love for after years of a bitter loveless marriage. Finally there is Warwar, one of the poachers, a young African limited in his choices who becomes hunted and hunter as the harsh landscape turns the tables on the two sides.

   Set on the border between Kenya and Ethiopia, the novel is unrelenting in its portrait of the modern African reality, of what the continent faces and the struggle of human and wildlife to survive the increasingly few resources.

   â€œWe took out seven poachers but three more got away, with the tusks. You know it won’t stop till every elephant is dead. The problem’s Africa: the world wants copper so Africa rips open its belly. The world wants diamonds so Africa sends its young men down mines to die for them. People want ivory and colobus skins and oil and slaves so Africa plunders herself for them!”

   Bond balances his lyricism with hard-boiled writing and an unbiased view of the world, of tough men doing tough jobs and sometimes becoming too hardened to them, of men making wrong choices both because they have to few chances and the lure of easy wealth. It isn’t an easy world or a reassuring one he writes of, and the results aren’t often pretty, but he writes the adventure novel as well as I have seen it written for a while.