‘Just look at these pictures. That’s what happens when there are no game laws and men are allowed to let their lust for killing run away with them. Extermination,’ he thundered.
(The Big Footprints, page 75)

Characteristics

Innes’ novels have half a dozen regular characteristics.

1. Exotic location

Here, it’s Kenya, exhausted and dilapidated at the end of a (fictional) civil war, during which armies on both sides ravaged the wildlife, sometimes going on killing sprees and decimating the large mammals, especially elephants. Wildlife is also being destroyed by a severe drought and – the general message of the novel – by the growing demands of a spiralling population.

2. Ordinary bloke hero

Colin Tait, a freelance TV producer/director, is in Kenya to attend a conference of wildlife activists. Sort of interesting though this is, he harbours an ambition to travel north to Lake Rudolf to confirm descriptions he’s read in an unpublished manuscript given him by his publisher uncle, of a mountain littered with ancient buildings, where pottery has been found depicting a pyramid hill capped with buildings, indications of one of the earliest cultures in the world, the so-called rock pyramid of Porr.

3. Mysterious, older figure who bears a secret

The classic example is Captain Patch from The Wreck of The Mary Deare who keeps secret from the narrator for 250 pages the fact that his ship didn’t sink as everyone thinks, but that he beached it to keep it as evidence of company embezzlement and fraud. Here the mysterious older figure is Cornelius van Delden, a legendary Africa hand, tall, white-haired, an expert on Kenyan wildlife and environments, nicknamed Tembo. He is virtually banned in this fictional Kenya for speaking out against the government’s acquiescence in the mass murder of wildlife by their troops during the war and by the runaway population, and so he makes a lightning appearance at the conference before disappearing in a well-arranged stunt. Eventually the entire novel turns into his quixotic quest to save the area’s last wild elephants from hunters, aided – or witnessed – by Colin and American TV journalist, Abe Finkel.

4. The curse of the past

For a writer so at home with the modern world of travel magazines, international flights, with the minutiae of business law and practice, and capable of inspiring descriptions of physical activity, Innes’ plots almost all feature a heavy Gothic sense of doomed family relationships. Here we learn that the environmentalist van Delden was once best friends and business partner of Alex Kirby-Smith, but whereas the former has gone into sharp criticism of the government, the latter has allied with the same government, seeing it as the best way to moderate its excesses and regulate surviving wildlife, also setting up a fleet of meat freezing trucks to capitalise on his hunting activities, and generally exposing himself to accusations of being a heartless butcher.

5. Woman, carrier of the past

Van Delden has a daughter, Mary, who loves him but also gets drunk and cries about how he was never around when she was small, was always disappearing off into the bush, animals more important than her or her mother etc. Tait, as so many Innes’ protagonists, finds himself attracted to this strong-minded, tough woman (and eventually, on page 250, they do have wild sex during a thunderstorm on a mountain), but she is, as so often, heir to a twisted family legacy. For half way through the book she reveals that she is in fact Kirby-Smith’s daughter. Van Delden’s wife had an affair with his best friend, impregnating her, though it was van Delden who brought Mary up and who she spent her childhood calling father. No wonder she becomes very upset as the rivalry between the two men becomes more intense.

In fact, everyone has ‘a past’, as the book reveals that Colin’s parents committed suicide by jumping off a cliff, and he was raised by an uncle in the publishing trade, and routinely bullied at school for having no parents. And Abe Finkel, who he teams up with, reveals half way through that his reason for abandoning the journalistic mission he was on, is that his wife recently died of cancer, making him realise, if you don’t fulfil your dreams of roaming in the African bush now, when will you…?

6. Hesitation and miscommunication

Presumably it’s intended to create tension, but on every page occurs Innes’ trademark technique of having more or less every conversation dominated by one or both sides turning away, stopping in mid-sentence, pausing, going silent, shrugging or hesitating. It creates the sense that everyone knows something they’re not telling. Intended to create ‘suspense’ and tension, it risks leaving the reader frustrated and irritated.

On one level there is a ‘plot’ – when the other conference delegates catch the bus back to Nairobi airport, Tait, influenced by New York TV man Abe Finkel, decides to stay on, to see if there’s mileage in the van Delden story, but really planning to head north to Lake Rudolph, to the mysterious mount Kulal and the archaeological finds he’s read about in the old manuscript his uncle left him.

This sounds like it should be a dynamic situation, but on a page by page, paragraph by paragraph level, the text is made up instead of these endless deferrals, postponements and delays.

She gave a little shrug…I hesitated…He didn’t say anything after that…She didn’t answer. The silence was oppressive…After that we didn’t talk…Karanja hesitated…She shook her head…She was silent now…She didn’t answer…He didn’t say anything…He hesitated…He nodded uncertainly…He shrugged. ‘How the hell do I know? It’s just a feeling.’..’I don’t know. Maybe’…Karanja shook his head. ‘I don’t know’…He shrugged…He hesitated, staring up the road ahead…He was silent for a moment. the smile gone. Then he gave a quick little shrug…Abe asked, ‘Any game left?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said, uncertainly…Murphy hesitated…Abe gave a little shrug…He hesitated…Van Delden shook his head. ‘Who knows?’…Van Delden shook his head…Karanja hesitated, then he shrugged…He shook his head…I shook my head…She was silent for a moment…She gave a little shrug…I hesitated…I shook my head, not wanting to talk about it…Kirby-Smith hesitated..I shook my head…But Karanja shook his head…Her gaze went back to the mountains and she was silent for a long time…She hesitated…She shrugged…

On one page, 156 in the Fontana paperback edition, Colin and Abe are asking their tracker, previously a van Delden associate, where van Delden must be hiding out and every paragraph starts this way: ‘Karanja shrugged… Karanja didn’t answer…Karanja shook his head again…Karanja was silent…Karanja hesitated…He was suddenly silent…Karanja hesitated…staring urgently at Abe, who didn’t say anything for a long time…’

On the very next page, Mary joins Abe and Colin and asks whether they think van Delden shot the Africans (see below): ‘…Silence was the only answer I could give her…I didn’t say anything…She was silent for a moment…her voice trembling into silence…She was silent for a while…I sat there, silent, not knowing what to say…’

Though they’re meant to be adventure books and are set in adventurous locations and feature violent and tragic incidents, the actual page-by-page experience of reading a Hammond Innes book is often of stasis and paralysis.

7. Participle clauses

There is another mannerism or part of Innes’ style perhaps worth commenting on, his tendency to write sentences which – after an active first clause – have two or three dependent clauses containing no active verb, but instead participles (generally the present participle or the past participle) or no verb form at all.

Short simple examples are obviously designed to create breathless excitement.

We waited, crouched in the gulley, listening. (p.166)

The elephants had all swung round, trunks weaving, seeking the new source of danger. (p.191)

And the effect can be strung out over longer distances:

Evergreens and patches of thick impenetrable bush, the boles of tall trees, twisted ropes of lianas, and my heart pounding as we climbed, following the beam of Karanja’s torch. (p.163)

But longer, slower sentences using this structure crop up throughout the novel, creating a particular effect which I can’t quite put my finger on.

I didn’t answer [main verb], suddenly aware of her reaching out [present participle clause], her hand on my arm [no-verb clause], pulling me down beside her [present participle clause]. (p.249)

Two possible interpretations occur to me – pictorial and static. Pictorial The main clause with the main verb introduces the sentence, and then the successive clauses, lacking an active verb, are like pictures, images, stills – as in a slideshow.

We were heading [main verb] across country in a more northerly direction, our speed gradually increasing [present participle], patches of soft sand, the scrub thicker and more trees [no verb]. (p.204)

From where we stood in the back of our truck we could see the flat expanse of the makeshift airstrip, scrub and boulders piled along the line of its single runway, and beyond it the thicker bush that marked the line of the lugga, acacias with flattened tops, and further still the greener growth spilling from the low arms of the mountains, the Horr Valley a sharp gash between cedar-dark slopes and the sky beginning to take on colour, the first rose tints of the rising sun. (p.139)

We were climbing now, the land sloping gently upward, the heat increasing rapidly. (p.180)

Static

Or, conversely, the lack of active verbs – their replacement with verbless clauses – sometimes adds to the sense of stasis and paralysis created by the endless silences and hesitations of the characters.

I sat on by the fire for a while, smoking a last cigarette and listening to the stillness. (p.110)

the present participles – ‘smoking’ and ‘listening’ – embodying the static lingering of the sitting. Or:

The argument went on for several minutes while we sat there motionless, the engine throbbing and the heat trapped in the valley. (p.111)

where the second clause gives a kind of sensual amplification of the first part, so that you can hear the engine ticking over, feel the prickliness of the African heat.

Nobody spoke, van Delden sitting silent and withdrawn, the three Africans squatting round the embers, a stillness settling on the land. (p.283)

The plot

Abe Finkel persuades Colin to stay on after the conference is over. The army officials who supervised the conference and all the delegates’ travel let them travel north on the understanding they are going to link up with Kirby-Smith’s troop who are carrying out a cull. But a pilot they chatted to saw a small camp off west of the road and here they find van Delden and three loyal African beaters/shooters, who promptly commandeer their Land Rover. A little later Colin and Abe are picked up by an army patrol of surly Africans and driven on to the Kirby-Smith camp.

Here Kirby-Smith says you’re welcome to watch and film a modern culling – and so there is a sickening description of him and his men in Land Rovers and trucks corralling half a dozen elephants into a clearing where they are shot down in seconds – and their corpses then set on by the soldiers, quickly joined by truckloads of locals (who are suffering from the drought and almost starving) who hack the dead animals to pieces.

It was the sort of scene cameramen dream about, nomadic tribesmen, hunters with guns, and elephants being hacked to pieces, blood everywhere. Close-ups of men, half-naked, armed with spears and knives, dark skins stretched over staring rib cages, faces drawn and shrivelled looking, of dead elephants, of tusks and meat, of Kirby-Smith, the great white hunter, firing at a warrior with his red cloak flung back, his sleek ochred hair coming loose in coils like snakes and his knife flashing. (p.145)

The next day, the cullers head out to another location to intercept another herd but, just as the elephants come into view, warning shots are fired which make the herd turn and escape, then one of the Kirby-Smith trucks explodes in flames, burning to a crisp the Africans inside. An appalled Colin is forced to agree with Kirby-Smith and Abe’s assessment that the men in it were shot dead, then the petrol tank ignited, by van Delden and his renegades. Van Delden has crossed the line and, in his bid to defend animals, has himself become a murderer. This is the context for Mary’s agonised confession that she is Kirby-Smith’s daughter but raised by van Delden and so caught between the two enemies.

In fact Mary begs Colin and Abe slip away from their army minders and go warn Van Delden that K-S and the army will now hunt him down and kill him, and so they persuade the African scout, Karanja, to take them to an old poacher’s hideout where they think van Delden might be lurking. And so they set off on what turns into the prolonged trek which will dominate the rest of the book. Briefly they scramble through scrub, up slopes, through forest, scared by wildlife, with vivid descriptions of the landscape, the nightscape, the animals and so on.

Van Delden appears out of the darkness and takes Colin and Abe under his wing, travelling with him and his scouts in pursuit of the next group of elephants. There’s an encounter with Kirby-Smith where they interrupt his trailing of another group of elephants, commandeering his Land Rover and smashing his rifle. Now their rivalry has turned into outright hatred. Mary had been in the vehicle. Van Delden makes her choose: are you walking back with Kirby-Smith or coming with us? In fact, he bundles her into the Rover as it sets off, and so she is now part of the small team.

Colin, Abe, van Delden and his pair of scouts drive on across the bush, passing through varieties of landscape allowing Innes descriptive faculties full rein. Whenever they camp and eat and talk, conversation turns to how to help the elephants survive and, increasingly, speculation as to why so many of the groups they’re coming across are travelling north, away from the overpopulated plains, towards the bleaker landscape around Lake Rudolph. Can elephants communicate? Do they know it is safer up there? Can they sense and communicate more than humans are aware of?

Van Delden goes off with one of the scouts, leaving Colin, Abe, Mary and Karanja to trek up the side of the mysterious mount Kalula (although there are not one but two maps showing the routes of these journeys, I found it impossible to follow their paths, and the text is quite vague about which bit of savannah, scrub, forest, desert, lava bed, river, hillside or mountain they are scrambling over at any particular point). Abe is experiencing increasingly visionary episodes, at one point almost going off on his own to defend a troop of elephants from the pursuing hunters, though talked out of it by Colin.

This mountain, Kulal, within thirty miles of Lake Rudolph, is setting to the climax of the novel: beyond it is where all the elephant groups seem to be heading. At its foot is an abandoned missionary building and it is here, on the edge of a steep gorge, that van Delden leaves them, promising to return once he’s found the elephants.

Later they hear engines and realise an army patrol is approaching, and quickly slip out of the back of the building and into the foothills of Mount Kulal, climbing quickly through low forest into the mist. After hours of climbing, they get to a sort of shelter among the rocks and spend the night. Here the group split up, Abe going with the tracker Dima, downstream towards the plain and the lake, while Colin and Mary go with Karanja up the sides of the mountain; as they near the peak a violent storm breaks out and it is here, in a rock shelter, that Mary suddenly offers herself to Colin and the simmering tension between the two is lanced in a feverish act of love-making (p.249).

Climbing higher they come upon a confusion of jagged volcanic spikes and gulleys and realise this can’t be the inhabited mountain top of the old account. Maybe it is on top of Mount Porr, thirty miles to the north and west…

Descending the mountain they hear a human cry and come upon Abe badly injured. He was with Kanjara when a cow elephant came to a nearby waterhole and Abe couldn’t resist sneaking really close to take photos. Something alarmed the cow who bellowed and its nearby calf came thundering out of the bush and trampled over Abe. He has a badly broken arm and cuts to the head. Kanjara, Colin and Mary help him down the rest of the mountain and to the shores of Lake Rudolph. That night, as they camp round a fire by the lakeside, van Delden appears out of the darkness. They learn that he and his scout have disabled the plane Kirby-Smith was using, sneaking up on it as the pilot worked on it, and have stolen another army truck. Not popular.

Karanja deserts them to go contact an army patrol. He returns saying he’s made a deal, van Delden to be flown out, a nature reserve set up, Karanji in charge of it. But none of this seems real compared with the stillness of the vast lake, the flamingos in the shallows, the elephants plodding silently to the shore, the immense primitiveness of the setting which Innes conveys as the characters stay awake most of the night knowing the next day will bring the inevitable Showdown the whole narrative has been building towards.

Van Delden drops Mary and the injured Abe where they can walk, or stagger, back the Mission, then returns with his scouts and Colin to the culling zone. Here trucks appear to scare a herd of elephants hidden in the forest out into the open; they emerge and there is a moment’s pause as the Land-Rovers containing their killers approach, then they go wild, trumpeting and attacking the vehicles. Abe makes a last, mad attempt to intercede, to change their direction and Mary comes running to his help and to my surprise both are trampled to death by the elephants who go on to rampage through the hunters’ vehicles, killing and goring many men, themselves losing many to rifle shots before breaking off the attack and lumbering towards the lake.

In the aftermath van Delden and an injured Kirby-Smith confront each other over Mary’s dead body while a disbelieving Colin looks on. Karanja appears and has now secured what he wanted ever since we first met him at the conference, power and authority – the minister who van Delden humiliated at the conference has been replaced and Karanji made Warden of a new wildlife sanctuary of the north: Karanji orders Kirby-Smith to suspend the cull; van Delden’s elephants are safe.

The small group bury Mary and Abe, building a cairn over their bodies. As night falls Colin falls asleep at their camp, exhausted. In the morning he wakes to see the small figure of van Delden paddling the primitive raft they found by the lake, north, towards the elephants. Karanji stands with the other African scouts: they will give Colin a lift back to civilisation, and 12 hours later he is back in London, unable to believe everything he has experienced and felt, determined to write this account of his strange adventure.

Nature writing

Innes is not what I’d call a prose poet. He doesn’t have the magical way with words of a Chandler or Cruz Smith. But, unlike a thriller writer like, say, Desmond Bagley (who also wrote a novel set in Africa, Juggernaut) he goes out of his way to provide descriptions of animals and, especially, of natural landscapes and changing times of day. These are, I think, most effective when Innes is in his beloved environment, the sea, but there are numerous attempts in this novel to convey the immediacy of the African scene, and of the elephants which dominate the story.

We pushed on, silent again, walking in a pale, cool light that was the interregnum between night and day. But it was brightening all the time and then suddenly the sun pushed a great shield of burnished red up into the eastern sky, and instantly the land flared with colour. From the flat sepia of desert gravel it turned to a dried blood hue in which everything glistened with light, scrub and thorn and skittering birds all brilliant with the great red glow of heat to come. It was fantastic, breathtaking… (p.180)

Save elephants, save the environment

Innes presumably intended this whole novel as propaganda, warning of the consequences of unchecked population growth in developing countries and the disastrous impact on wildlife. 40 years later I, like most people, I think, take it for granted that we are poisoning the seas, wiping out most large mammals as well as countless other species, and that it is too late to prevent catastrophic global warming.

Therefore, this novel seems like a memory of a more innocent age, the 1970s, when writers and the educated middle classes founded environmental pressure groups (World Wide Fund for Nature founded 1961, Friends of the Earth founded 1969, Greenpeace founded 1971) and thought there was something they could do to protect wildlife and the environment…

[Karanja] was staring out to the darkness of the gorge and after a moment he said, ‘Is part of our heritage and one day, maybe, I live to see those same elephants crossing Kulal again, but going the other way, going south into the lands they live in when I am young man, going to protected areas where the world can see them again. Quiet, dignified elephants living in peace and rearing their calves. Not fleeing half-starved and in terror, charging everywhere.’ He shook his head, smiling to himself. ‘Is a dream maybe, but that is what I hope.’ (p.247)

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Related links

• African Wildlife Foundation
• Hammond Innes Wikipedia article
• Independent obituary
• New York Times obituary
• Hammond Innes book covers on the Bear Alley website

Hammond Innes reviews

• Hammond Innes reviews