The Flight of the Pelican by John Hopkins (Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press, 1983)
I had very much admired two other books by John Hopkins, which I had read many years ago: Tangier Buzzless Flies and The Tanger Diaries 1962 – 1979, a non-fictional and fictional account of the time Hopkins spent in Moroccoo in the ’60s and ’70s. These books are both artful and intelligent, and written with considerable artistry and skill.
Unfortunately I did not think The Flight of the Pelican was anywhere near as good as those two books. It’s an overwrought adventure novel, set in an imagined South (or Central) American country, where everything and everyone is larger than life and simultaneously comic and lurid.
Jonathan Bradshaw, the good-for-nothing scion of a wealthy and well-connected New England family, journeys to Puerto Gosano in search of his father, who sailed south 25 years ago, disappeared, and is assumed to be dead. But when his sailboat, the Pelican, is found the family believes he might still be alive in the jungles of Puerto Gosano, and dispatch Jonathan forthwith.
Jonathan creates a lot of (unbelievable) mayhem and encounters a lot of terrible things ( vampire bats, a house full of genetically-deformed orphans, feral dogs, vultures), before finding his father, who is indeed living in the jungle with his ferocious knife-wielding common-law wife, and suffering from a terrible rotting skin disease brought on by unsanitary jungle life.
The first two-thirds of the book are somewhat engaging, but when Jonathan finally encounters his father, most of the buoyancy and energy dissipate and the final third of the book (like the tail-end of so many journeys) is tedious and exhausting. Hopkins writes alluringly about geography and flora and fauna, and this gives the book a consistent sensual vividness, but it is not enough to sustain a reader’s interest, for the world of the book, though well evoked, is finally too unreal and arbitrary to engage a reader’s attention or sympathy.
John Hopkins (l) and Joe McPhillips (r)
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