Adventure Compiled

Gerald Durrell writes directly for the children

The New Noah by Gerald Durrell

I have no doubt, no doubt in my mind, that the most eager, energetic, fervid readers of Gerald Durrell have always been children. No one but a child could wring every last drop of beauty and freedom from the Corfu trilogy, Durrell’s memoirs of his own youth. In adulthood, one enjoys and admires the books, of course. But for the right sort of child, they are something different, something beyond.

This book is a collection for children — a distillation of several trips to foreign lands, over many years, and many different encounters with animals. The Durrell completist, if reading his books in publication order, will have met many of these animals before. The massive ant-eater who proved so powerful and difficult to catch. The caiman so enormous that it was caught between two weighted boats, its thrashing, writhing body only secured when its mouth was tied shut, its neck restrained, its vicious tail trapped beneath taut ropes, its scrabbling legs curtailed. And the many little things that sat in cages chittering or ran about the camp because they had grown too tame to be confined. All of these animals, the reader may have met before.

But this is a book for children — and a new test emerges. What do we bother to write children’s books for? And does this one make the grade?

Mostly, we write books for children to try to teach them things. They don’t know much, on the whole, but many of them are eager — some even desperate — to learn. My grandfather is very fond of saying, particularly about babies and infants, that they’re like little sponges — their big eyes open so wide, often their mouths hanging open, taking everything in at a rate even computerised, artificial minds built to do the same could not match. Many adults lose their interest in learning things the moment they leave school: when no longer have they to sit another exam. But children, because ordinary school is such a tyranny, might be expected to find a little solace, a little escape, in learning things that won’t be on the test. The question to be asked is whether this book meets that high bar.

I’ll talk for a moment about some things I personally enjoyed. I liked this telling of the story of the opossums in Guiana. How Durrell claims he did not know of the species’ affinity for playing dead, and assumed that the animal he and his pack had been chasing had simply keeled over from the exertion, from the excitement, of the hunt. He picked up the unmoving animal, thinking it was dead, and then it quivered back to life, and was either captured or, its ruse successful, it got away. (Whether we believe that Durrell did not know of this well-attested fact of opossum biology, that is for readers alone to judge.)

Another interesting story is the hunting of the armadillo native to South America: this is one of the few Armadillo sub-species, Durrell writes, whose members actually roll up completely into a ball when startled. Hunting them is thus dead easy. You create a disturbance of some kind, wait long enough that the noise or commotion would have dismayed the armadillos and forced them to take defensive action, and then go about, sack in hand, scooping the little fellows up and confining them between muslin walls.

I enjoyed also stories we have already heard about Cuthbert the peeting bird — a strange creature, so tame as to be an impediment, who loved mankind and loved most of all to show his affection by falling asleep on the shoes or feet of someone who was apt to trip over his form in the dark.

It’s no secret that I like it when the animals escape and though this version loses some colour compared to the original, I enjoyed the story of the getting out — two times in succession — of an electric eel: an eel lose inside a slowly moving canoe. You can’t tell too many stories about something like that — not least the aside that one of the paddling men at the back was preparing to leap overboard into what I can only assume were waters filled with other eels. And presumably some creatures even nastier and more willing to make a meal of man than an eel might be.

And I enjoyed some of the new stories — the ones told only in later volumes: about toads and frogs in South America who inflate themselves so much, the natives say, when they are angry that they are apt to burst.

This is an enjoyable book. It is simple enough and easy to read and it does not have many of the more lyrical passages for which Durrell is famous — the things which made me love his books; I read of his childhood in Corfu when I was myself young. As an aid to children learning about wildlife, this is a good book, suited to its purpose. It will interest them — it might make them laugh. But compared to the full fat version, there is less beauty; there is less elegance.

And for some children, that (the lyrical) is what they might appreciate. It might be something they are not getting elsewhere. And it might be, even if they complain about its difficulty, even if they say they do not get it, precisely what they really need.