'Horn of the Hunter,' Reviewed

Photo copyright 2012 by Jackson Landers

You can count me as a fan of Robert Ruark. I've enjoyed his best-known book, the semi-autobiographical, 'The Old Man's Boy' and its follow-up, 'The Old Man's Boy Grows Older.' 'The Old Man's Boy' has become arguably his most enduring work, but it was his books on hunting in Africa that brought him the most success in his own time.

'Horn of the Hunter' is the story of Ruark's first African safari, taken in the early 1950's in the company of his wife, Virginia. A hunting safari at that time was still expected to last for months and include a huge variety of wild game.

The journey that Ruark and his wife took was absolutely a great adventure which was worthy of writing about. The characters, landscape and encounters with wildlife were all excellent material. But there were two factors which prevented me from enjoying this book as much as I would have liked.

'Horn of the Hunter' was conceived and written after Ernest Hemingway had published 'Green Hills of Africa' and after Ruark had read it. Ruark actually went out of his way to book a safari that would include the services of Kidogo, a talented tracker that Hemingway had used for the safari that 'Green Hills of Africa' immortalizes.

The similarities between these two books are too strong to ignore. Ruark read a book about an African safari taken by an American writer with his wife and promptly took his wife off to Africa to hunt with the exact same tracker in pursuit of the exact same prey and then he wrote a book about it. There is little choice but to compare Ruark's book to Hemingway's.

Ruark himself had clearly gotten Hemingway on the brain while writing this book. In his 'Old Man' series, Ruark writes with a unique voice and style. But Hemingway's style and posture infects Ruark's prose to an embarrassing degree in 'Horn of the Hunter.' For example, consider this excerpt from chapter 12:

"I thought of all the stuff about the Pacific, the Japs living in caves and in the woods on Guam, and coming up at night to drink from our freshly erected outdoor shower baths and to steal what they could and occasionally shoot a Marine or a Seabee. I remembered that ghastly hop all the way from Guam to Melbourne in a two-motored aircraft, and waking up with a hangover in the middle of the Owen Stanley range in New Guinea and not knowing where I was, and landing blind at a place called Owi or Ebi or some such, landing with no radio on a field that had no lights at night. I thought about the long, painful hospital time in the Solomons and later in San Francisco, with a shattered arm that could just as easily have been a shattered back."

That's a whole lot of words with only a few periods. Its also a selection from a book set in Africa. Out of nowhere, Ruark suddenly has this extended flashback montage of stuff from World War Two which has nothing to do with anything else going on in the book. Just a little friendly reminder to the reader that Ruark is not only the stuff of 'Green Hills of Africa,' but also that he's your man in 'A Farewell to Arms.'

By the time I'd gotten to the end of chapter 13 I felt deeply embarrassed on Ruark's behalf for what amounts to a massive exercise in ripping off Hemingway. Not just in style, but in the whole premise behind the book, and in these naked attempts to point out how very much he felt that he had with the elder writer.

It got worse with the very first sentence of chapter 14:

"Some people say I look a little like Ernest Hemingway used to look when he was younger."

Seriously, he wrote those words. Ruark then goes on for several pages about being a fan of Hemingway's but never have the nerve to walk up and talk to him.

I don't think that its a terrible crime to try to write with a Hemingway-like style. But I do think that Ruark went to such extremes to imitate EH in every respect for this book that I have little choice but to look at it as a sort of weak imitation of 'Green Hills.'

Hemingway mentioned Ruark in passing towards the end of his own last book, 'True at First Light,' which also happened to be about a safari in Africa. So its nice that Ruark finally got the old man's attention.

The second factor which prevented me from enjoying 'Horn of the Hunter' quite as much as I might have was the fact that I read it knowing perfectly well that Ruark later died of complications of cirrhosis of the liver.

Robert and Virginia Ruark are drinking alcohol on every other page of the book. It is constant. I confess to various mentions of people drinking in my own new book, 'Eating Aliens.' I also confess that I probably included those bits due to influence from Jack London and Ernest Hemingway ('John Barleycorn' probably ranks among my top ten favorite books of all time). But Ruark rarely finds a situation where hard liquor is not called for. Alcohol is served on this safari regularly with breakfast, lunch and dinner. If Ruark had died in a car accident then I'd find this stuff just sort of amusing, but knowing that I'm watching the death by installment of a writer whom I respect lends a sad tone to many parts of the book that the author never intended to feel that way.

I wanted to like this book, and in fact there are many parts of it which were very enjoyable. But I'm left with the sense that Ruark let his voice get lost in the shadow of Hemingway and in the white logic of alcohol.