Greenhorns into the Heart of Borneo

By Kenneth Turan

Within this intrepid travelogue lies the soul of Monty Python. The setting is the third largest island in the world, a fetid, fiercely overgrown jungle seething with carnivorous fauna and suspicious tribes. The protagonists are two British greenhorns with minimal survival skills. Poet James Fenton, 35, likes to spend his spare time reading the poems of Swift in a canoe. Narrator Redmond O'Hanlon, 37, is a literary naturalist who admits before embarking on the 1983 expedition, "The nearest I had ever come to a tropical rain-forest, after all, was in the Bodleian Library." Actually, he edges a bit closer when he consults some old Borneo hands. "You'll find the high spot of your day," advises one, "is cleaning your teeth. The only bit of you you can keep clean. Don't shave in the jungle, because the slightest nick turns septic at once . . . You'll think it's the end of the world. You can't breathe. You can't move." Wear long pants, he continues. "You won't want to nancy about in shorts once the first leech has had a go at you, believe me." Another tells him, "Take lots of postcards of the Queen, preferably on horseback, and showing all four legs, because they think she's all of a piece." And a policeman at Singapore airport warns: "They eat people in there! They're cannibals! Blowpipes! Phut. Phut. You die. No noise. Very better than a gun."

Despite these caveats, and with the help of guides and a letter of introduction from Oxford to the local authorities ("a talisman of medieval- looking splendour"), the Englishmen persevere--and suffer as advertised. Insects attack them everywhere ("I covered myself in SAS anti-fungus powder until my erogenous zone looked like meat chunks rolled in flour"), hordes of leeches rush across the jungle floor to greet them, and cicadas, "megaphones built into their bodies," keep up a decibel level "way over the limit allowed in discotheques."

There are rumors of rampant cannibalism, but Britons are evidently not in season. Instead, the explorers undergo a more familiar kind of torture. During one native gathering, they offer each other up to teach the quasiprimitive Borneans some new dance steps, and at another they end up, reports the author, so hung over that "someone seemed to have inserted a pestle into my cerebellum during the night, and was now using the inside top of my skull as a mortar." A native politely informs him, "You got drunks like a man who still lives in his mother's room. You got drunks like a schoolboy. You made noises like a babi when he looks in the ground for foods." Every misstep of the way, O'Hanlon employs a dry, self-deprecating style that cannot disguise the team's gifts for fresh and arresting description. Fenton calls the black- naped oriole "the flaming youth of the forest, the jeunesse d'or, the jungle glitterati." And O'Hanlon is chillingly adept at describing the river torrent that nearly killed his friend, and at expressing some thoughts about the omnipresence of early death by misadventure: "No wonder the population was so perpetually young, so beautiful." Into the Heart of Borneo makes the island more surreal than enticing; nevertheless, O'Hanlon has announced plans for a similar three-month tour down the Amazon. Some people never learn; and a good thing too.