Will Buckingham’s novel Cargo Fever (Tindal Street) is certainly a gripping adventure story, but it’s also an intriguing contribution to the the genre of the ape-monster story. I won’t assume Buckingham had such an academic goal in mind for the novel, but I do think Cargo Fever responds to the canon in interesting ways.¹

There are familiar models for the ape-monster genre, usually involving the expedition/discovery tale and/or the foreign intruder delivering menace.² In King Kong, there is first an expedition to an exotic “pre-modern” locale, then the fruit of that expedition is brought intrusively home to the “modern” world of New York. Or the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Creeping Man,” in which the aging Professor Presbury travels abroad to discover an “anthropoid serum” capable of reinvigorating him upon his return to England. And there is always a shockingly near-human ape, as in Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” with its orangutan shaving and preening himself as a gentleman might before an evening on the town.

Cargo Fever begins with its expat-Englishman protagonist waking from fever dreams in an Indonesian hotel, a scene reminiscent of both Apocalypse Now and Jean Lévy’s remark that watching King Kong in 1933 was like watching “trait by trait a remarkable detail of my familiar nightmares." And the story is, in some ways, familiar: the capture, smuggling, and inevitable escape of an exotic, intelligent ape (in this case the orang pendek of Indonesian folklore); the arrival of wealthier, more powerful outsiders determined to pursue their own gains; and the clear connection of anxieties about apes and humans to sexual desires and fears. But where this novel differs — and challenges — is expanding those familiar elements in unfamiliar directions.

The expected escape happens not in the “modern” world, but rather as the ape is transported from the urban center of Jakarta to a smaller rural town. The outsiders indeed pursue their own aims, but are thwarted and challenged at each step by other actors (rich and poor, men and women, young and old, local and foreign alike) each pursuing their own simultaneous agendas. Buckingham’s exotic subjects have an agency rare in any monster story, and this extends even to the sexualization of the ape monster: rather than simply highlight the frustrated “savage” desires of western men as in King Kong, this ape becomes a focus of sexual anxieties across race and class. Acting out his ambivalently human sexuality in a way never allowed to Kong (and in the process proving that anxieties about the Other being a more potent lover are, in this case, well-founded), this ape provides sexual and social liberation to repressed rural women, professional and personal satisfaction to western researchers, and religious fulfillment to believers of a syncretic local faith. The ape becomes, like Chance in Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There, all things to all people depending on what they’re looking for.³

There are important questions to ask about the potential problems of a white, western author “speaking for” non-western, non-white characters, and whether the diversity of convincing, complex voices (clearly the product of rich, affectionate experience of Indonesia on the part of the author) is enough to raise these questions for the reader. I also wondered why the ape/monster — almost exclusively in the novel — is never allowed to “speak” for himself even in some figurative way; his desires are viewed only through observed actions and speculation, which seems a missed chance at an even more surprising turn. There are moments at which narrative sense is outpaced by plot, leaving some of the characters’ decisions a bit unconvincing, and others at which the author’s own enthusiasms (philosophy, Buddhism, etc.) seem too forcefully injected into the novel — though I only know of these enthusiasms because I’ve been a regular reader of Buckingham’s blog since long before reading his novel, which raises other questions about reading in the age of the blog. But Cargo Fever is a thrilling and thoughtful read, perhaps because its author isn’t as dully academic about monster stories as I am, but most likely because it’s a plain old good novel, one that engages ideas without piling them too high or too heavily onto a rollicking plot.

¹ You should probably consider that fair warning of why this is more myopic reading than thorough review.

² There’s a forthcoming novel about the Hartlepool monkey — how exciting!

³ And as the novel becomes for me, reading it with such particular questions in mind.