The Great Greys

Author Gareth Crocker on African adventure stories and the mystique of elephants…

The froth of Gareth Crocker’s cappuccino has barely settled and already the former community newspaper editor has gone straight for the truth without flinching. “Ironically, I cannot stand African adventures stories,” he confesses. “They bore me. I think ten pages describing a tree is too much.”

It’s ironic, because Journey from Darkness is about as great an African adventure as there is: two brothers searching for their roots in Africa and embarking on an epic quest with the ‘Great Grey’ Shawu, a rare desert elephant trekking an ancient ancestral path to Bechuanaland, with the threat of poachers ever in her shadow.

Gareth’s frankness about the genre doesn’t at all detract from his love of the bush, but instead stems from his belief that the “story is king”. He was determined to take a different approach and, at the back of the book, he shares the ten things he’s learned about writing saying, ‘There are too many stories out there that, while written well, should never have been written in the first place.’

Interestingly, the central plot of the book is actually Gareth’s father’s creation. Llewellyn Crocker co-authored the book and Gareth credits much of Journey from Darkness to his father’s “remarkable imagination”. When they were writing the book a few years ago, Llewellyn was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. Today he’s in remission, but at one stage Gareth says he remembers his father telling him that he could quite happily follow in the character Derek’s footsteps.

“Male elephants are known to roam huge distances, and my dad said he’d love to walk behind one of them until he runs out of juice and just settles under a tree to die. It sounds a bit macabre, but I get it. He’s always had this idea in his head of journeying behind elephants, and that’s really where the story came from.”

Beyond an emotional connection to Shawu’s loss and a more vivid picture of poaching than newspaper statistics could ever hope to mimic, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why Journey from Darkness truly is like no other African adventure story you’ve ever read. A good way to start would be to take away the setting of the border between South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana and strip the story down to a few core themes like war, poaching, man’s depletion of natural resources and the duality of light and dark within us all. That leaves the magic and mystique behind Shawu and Derek’s quest into the great unknown, which provide for a large part of the book’s charm.

Derek risking death by dehydration and starvation to follow Shawu and see her safely over the border is as crazy as it is incredible. It’s a leap of faith, or “grand gesture”, as Gareth calls it, which the reader quite happily lives through vicariously.

“I suppose I am a ridiculous romantic at heart, but I love grand gestures,” he says. “I love the fact that Derek believes in Shawu’s intuition and believes that she will understand that he’s willing to help her.”

If the late, great Lawrence Anthony’s The Elephant Whisperer was ever converted into a work of fiction, the result would surely be Journey from Darkness. Both works deal with fascinating facts about elephants like their mourning, their ways of communicating with man and one another and their willingness to help other animals in distress, and both pay tribute to the majestic ‘Great Greys’ of the bush that have so much to teach us, if we’re only willing to open our minds and listen.

*First published on www.countrylife.co.za

*Journey from Darkness is published by Penguin Books. Visit www.penguinbooks.co.za for more information.