Sun 11 Nov 2018
MIKE BOND – The Last Savanna. Mandevilla Press, paperback, 2013.
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.
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.
November 11th, 2018 at 5:21 pm
Have you tried Malla Nunn and Deon Meyer?
November 11th, 2018 at 6:24 pm
And a separate question. I’ve not read anything by Bond, including this one. It’s not always easy to tell from a review, but it sounds as though it would make for a good movie, maybe one starring someone like Gregory Peck. What do you think?
November 11th, 2018 at 8:24 pm
David V, thank you for the review, he has actually had a fairly long writing career but I have to admit I didn’t know anything about him. So now another writer to start to read.
The review reminds me a little of Tony Park, who writes adventure novels set in Africa with a conscious.
Deon Meyer is fabulous, but both his books and Nunn’s are more police novels than adventure novels I believe.