Facing the Congo

I, Melachi ibn Amillar, being of unsound mind and body, did read "Facing the Congo" by Jeffrey Tayler (2000), in October 2014, mainly on the Northern Line. It is the story of his trip down the Congo from Kisangani in a local canoe. I was a bit puzzled to find myself halfway through the book without him having stepped in the canoe, but the mystery is solved if you paddle through to the end! He has a taste for the purple sentence, the first of the book being "The squawks of parrots filtered down into the black well of sleep and slowly called me up into the lighter realms of wakefulness", which is all you need to know, really. And there is occasional pontification, concluding: "I had exploited Zaire as a playground on which to solve my own rich-boy existential dilemmas". Well, there are worse ways to exploit Zaire. But it is not all that bad, with some great characters (I would have liked to know more about the "Colonel") and in fact gets quite exciting towards the end!