By Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
Harmony Books; 1990
In 1985 Observer Colour Magazine sent Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams, zoologist Mark Carwardine and a photographer to Madagascar in search of the elusive aye-aye for an article. I never read that article, but I am guessing it was a pretty inspired idea and the trip went well for all involved, as Adams and Carwardine continued their partnership well beyond that initial collaboration, soon embarking on a quest of sorts using that same template: The pair would pick out one of the world's most endangered animals, and then take a trip to see if they could find it in the wild. They ended up spending several years on the project.
The result of all that travel was the 1990 book Last Chance To See...although, like so much of Adams' work, it wasn't just a book. Adams and Carwardine first produced a BBC Radio 4 documentary series of their adventures that ran in 1989.
Given the particular subject, animals on the verge of extinction, it is perhaps a strange book to read for the first time 31 years after initial publication. The same can be said of many books dealing with science and current events, of course, but the intervening decades mean much of the most salient information in the book might no longer be relevant; some animals that were on the brink might have recovered, some might have actually gone extinct (Indeed, the Yangtze river dolphin and the northern white rhinoceros, both animals that were searched for in the book, are now presumed extinct and functionally extinct, respectively).
Of course, while one of the goals of Last Chance To See (the book and the radio show, as well as the original Observer article on the aye-aye), was to raise awareness of endangered species, there are certainly pleasures to be had in the reading of the book decades later, regardless of how up-to-date it's statistics on various breeding programs or wild animal counts might be.
The book is, after all, written by Adams, and the very sorts of witty observations on the human condition and comedy sketch-like conversations that punctuate his novels appear liberally throughout the book, which is essentially a first-person travelogue about an odd couple of traveling companions, each chapter devoted to the journey to a particular place to see a particular animal.
"My role, and one for which I was entirety qualified," Adams explained in his introduction, "was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise." That and, of course, to remember it all long enough to write it down afterwards. While the division of labor isn't entirely clear from the book, Adams seems to indicate that Carwardine had to do all of the hard work regarding the organizing of the trips and also the explaining of things to Adams, while Adams took notes and later wrote the book (While they share the author credit on the cover, the book sounds like Adams and is written in first-person; Carwardine does write an epilogue and he took all of the pictures included).
Each chapter chronicles a different trip, with the aye-aye story told extremely briefly in the introduction. From there the pair seek out the Komodo dragon in Indonesia, the northern white rhinoceros in Zaire (with a detour to visit mountain gorillas), the kakapo in New Zealand, the aforementioned Yangtze river dolphin in China (the only animal they completely fail to find in the wild) and the Rodrigues fruit bat in Mauritus (although their ornithologist contacts there quickly convince them to spend less time with the bat and more time with the even rarer birds that they are working to help).
While rare animals facing the specter of extinction doesn't exactly sound like comedy gold, Adams is a skilled enough humorist to find plenty of material. This is thanks, in large part, to the fact that he writes not only about the animals and their environments, but about people: He writes about himself and Carwardine, and the ways in which they are different from one another and from those they meet, he writes about fellow eco-tourists (quite memorably in the case of a pair of German students who so perfectly fit the stereotype of Gemran students that Adams is embarrassed by their inclusion), he writes about the various conservationists (many of whom qualify as what might charitably referred to as "characters") and he writes a lot about various bureaucrats in government offices and airports.
By constructing the book as a travelogue as much as a book about animals, Adams is able to treat readers to such stories as he and his crew's attempts to buy a condom in rural China, which proves to be only slightly less difficult than finding a river dolphin (The condom was to cover a microphone so they could safely lower it under the water, although no one they kinda sorta spoke to thought that's what it was for). We get to ride in too-small, overcrowded airplanes and dangerously-driven cars on poor roads. We get to marvel at foreign traffic patterns.
Beyond teasing out comedy bits, Adams proves quite adept at finding and communicating various cosmic ironies about life on Earth. Like, for example, that the lemurs were only able to flourish on Madagascar because there were no monkeys present, and thus they could fill the various niches that monkeys filled elsewhere—and then as soon as monkeys, in the form of ape-descended life forms more commonly known as human beings—arrived, we almost immediately imperiled them, doing the work out distant evolutionary ancestors would have done had they been able to take ships and planes to Madagascar. Now, it's up to us monkeys to save them.
While best-known for his fiction, Adams is quite a skilled non-fiction writer...although there are several passages where I found myself wondering how much he was fictionalizing certain characters and encounters. Some, like the Melbourne-based expert on venomous creatures that is bored silly by venom and venomous creatures and isn't shy about saying so, seems like the sort of character who might have appeared in one of Adams' novels, and his dialogue seems almost too perfect.
And then there's the kakapo, an animal so ridiculous that I would have been certain Adams had invented it for one of his Hitchhiker's books...were this book not labeled non-fiction. The kakapo is the world's largest parrot, and the only flightless one, although it appears to forget that it can't fly, as, when threatened, it will run up a tree, run off a branch and make an attempt, only to fall back to the ground where it started.
Their method of breeding is similarly complex and nonsensical, and involves the male calling from a "bowl" it makes in the ground to amplify its voice, and then the female having to walk—sometimes for miles—to get to the calling male's bowl. And hopefully he's there when she arrives, or they will have missed their connection. It is one of those animals that, when one learns about it, one isn't entirely surprised to find out that it's endangered.
Adams died suddenly in 2001 at the age of 49, and thus didn't have an opportunity to revisit his work on Last Chance To See. However in 2009, 20 years after the broadcast of the radio series, the BBC released a television show by that name, in which actor (and Adams' friend) Stephen Fry and Carwardine revisit many of the animals to see how they are doing.
Even that series is now over a decade out of date, however. Time moves fast in the world of conversation, but some broad truths don't change, even if some numbers and statistics might. Animals will always be imperiled, it will most often be all our fault and it will be within our power to save them.
Here's hoping for more chances to see.
