David Attenborough has long been an important figure in my
life. I have greatly admired him as a pioneering TV presenter who has created
some of the best documentary programmes in history. He helped shape television
and has been one of the most influential figures in the – sadly futile, it
seems – resistance to our human war on nature. His recent work, such as Planet
Earth I and II and Blue Planet, is astonishing. It seems that every show he
makes brings something utterly new to a cynical audience that thinks it has
seen everything.
I didn’t know that I could be any more impressed by David
Attenborough, but then I found out that he is an incredible writer. Adventures of a Young Naturalist is a
collection of three journals he kept whilst making very early programmes for
the BBC. Two of them see him visit South America and one recounts his travels
through Indonesia in search of the Komodo Dragon. All of them see him
attempting to capture animals for London Zoo and at the same time film them in
their natural habitat for the BBC.
I was expecting interesting, occasionally witty descriptions
of animals and plants, but while they do indeed appear in this book, most of it
is made up of wonderful observations about the landscape and culture of these
places, and his often hilarious interactions with the local people.
Attenborough was travelling in the era of the adventurer, long before the
tourist trod across these lands and ruined them. His journeys were difficult,
often fraught with hardship. Yet unlike writers such as Paul Theroux (whom I’ve
read often these past few years), Attenborough takes every set back with good
humour. Indeed, this book is often laugh-out-loud funny. It is very much an
adventure tale, filled with dangerous people and wild locations.
It is also a sad reminder of what we have lost. Attenborough
wrote these stories only sixty years ago, yet they may as well have come from
another planet. The jungles have been cut down, the animals brought to
extinction, and the cultures all blended into nothingness as Facebook and
Instagram make everyone look and act and think more and more like each other.
This book is a beautiful paean to all we’ve lost.
David Attenborough really is a stunningly good writer, and
this book at times made me jealous for my inability to describe places and
people the way he does (although of course I always assumed he could do better
at describing animals). He is a national treasure, a world treasure, and this
book is one of the best things I have read in many years. I highly recommend
it.
