Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

It’s a very interesting, and unusual, and weird experience for me to be talking in my home town. Which is … (Laughter.)

Now, amongst the books that Constance mentioned when she’s introducing me, The Hitchhiker’s Guide, Dirk Gently and so on, it was not my favourite book. And my favourite book (Last Chance to See) is what I’m here to talk about tonight. Virtually every author I know, their own favourite book is the one that sold the least. It’s somehow the runt of the litter, it’s the one you’ve always just loved the most. And I want to tell you about how this came about.

Sometime in about the mid 1980s, the phone rang. (Laughter.)

And the voice said, “We want you to go to Madagascar. We want you to look for a very rare form of lemur, called the Aye-aye. The plane leaves in two weeks, we would like you to be on it.” Now I—assuming they’ve got the wrong number—said “yes!” before they could discover their mistake. (Laughter.) But in fact it turned out that they decided, “Well, here is somebody who doesn’t know anything about lemurs, anything about the Aye-aye, anything about Madagascar, let’s send him.” (Laughter.) So I started to try and find out something about it, and it turns out it’s very interesting.

Lemurs used to be the dominant primate in all the world. And they were very, very gentle, pleasant creatures. They were a little bit like sort of cat size, and they used to hang around in the trees having a nice time. And then, Gondwanaland split up. It always sounds like some sort of 70’s rock group going their own way for reasons of musical differences. But as you probably remember Gondwanaland was that vast continental landmass that consisted of what then became South America, Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Australasia—uh, no—Australia, Australia and not—and this will turn out to be significant later—not New Zealand which turns out to be just a lot of gunk that came out from under the ocean. (Laughter.)

And as I say, lemurs were the dominant primate around the world, and when all these landmasses split up, and Madagascar was one of them, Madagascar kind of sailed off into the middle of what then suddenly became the Indian Ocean. And took with it a representative sample of the livestock of the period, which included a lot of lemurs. And they basically sort of sat there for millions and millions of years in glorious isolation. While, in the rest of the world, a new creature emerged. A new creature arrived that was much more intelligent than the lemurs—according to it—, (Laughter) much more competitive, much more aggressive, and incredibly interested in all of things you could do with twigs. (Laughter.)

Twigs were absolutely wonderful. There is so much you can do with twigs—you can dig in the ground for things with twigs, you can burrow under the bark of trees for grubs, you can hit each other with twigs. If there had been copies of TwigUser Magazine around on those days, these creatures would have been lining up for it. And these creatures—which, as you have probably guessed, are called the monkeys—, because they were more competitive and more aggressive, and they lived in the same habitat as the lemurs, they successfully supplanted the lemurs everywhere in the world other than Madagascar. Because Madagascar was right out in the middle of the Indian Ocean and they couldn’t get there.

They couldn’t get there until about 1500 years ago, when due to startling advances in twig technology (laughter) they were able to get there in boats, and eventually planes. And suddenly the lemurs, that have had this place for themselves for millions and millions and millions of years, were suddenly facing their old enemy: the monkey. So, this is Madagascar, and it turns out that the rarest of the lemurs—and when I say the rarest of the lemurs, at this particular point in the mid 80’s they were thought to be the rarest of the lemurs; we’ve now discovered and even rarer lemur called the Golden Bamboo Lemur, which went straight to the number one of endangered lemurs—but the Aye-aye is a very very peculiar animal. It looks like the agglomeration of all sorts of other different animals. So, for instance, it has a sort of foxy ears, and it has a little sort of bitty rabbit’s teeth, and it has a kind of ostrich [feathered?] tail, and it has very weird eyes, actually it has Marty Feldman’s eyes. (Laughter.) The kind of sort of looking slightly beyond you into a sort of other dimension just over your left shoulder. But it also has one very very very peculiar characteristic, which is its middle finger on both hands is skeletally thin and very very long. (Laughter.)

And it turns out there is only one other animal in the entire world that has this feature. And this is called—I love zoologists; they have such vivid imaginations—it’s called the Long-Fingered Possum. (Laughter.) And this is a creature that lives in New Guinea, and in fact it is its fourth finger that is skeletally thin and elongated. And this is the thing that tells us that there is no relationship between these animals, it’s pure convergent evolution, because the common factor between Madagascar and the Aye-aye, and New Guinea and the Long-Fingered Possum is that in both habitats there are no woodpeckers. (Laughter.) And you see, the thing is—life is very very opportunistic, and it will take advantage of any food source it finds around the place. And if there are no woodpeckers looking under the bark of trees for grubs, then, in this case, it will be the mammals that grow the skeletally thin long finger to burrow under the bark of the tree, and get to this source of food which is the grubs under the bark.

So, the Aye-aye is this very very very strange creature. And at this time it was thought there were only about fifteen of them left. And they lived actually not on Madagascar itself, but on a tiny little rainforest island just off the coast of Madagascar, called Nosy Mangabe, and it’s just off the northwest tip of Madagascar. And now to get there, what you have to do, is you have to fly in a 747 to Madagascar. And then in a terrible old jalopy of an airplane from Madagascar up to the northwest port. And from there you have to go in a kind of decreasingly excellent series of carts and trucks and so on, (Laughter) to a little port where there was going to be a boat that was going to take us to Nosy Mangabe. So we arrived there, and arrived at the port, and we were looking around for the boat that was going to take us to Nosy Mangabe, and we couldn’t see it. And we kept in turn asking people–you know–“where is this boat?”, and they would say “it’s there! it’s there!”, and we couldn’t see what they were pointing at because there was this terrible rotting old hulk in the way. (Laughter.)

Well as you guessed, this is the terrible rotting old hulk in which we have to go to Nosy Mangabe. And it didn’t fulfill what to my mind was the sort of basic criteria of a boat, in that it was basically full of ocean. (Laughter.) And it seemed to me that the whole point of a boat was to keep the ocean on the outside. (Laughter.) Anyway, so we crossed to Nosy Mangabe. And it’s this tiny little, very very beautiful little rainforest island. And we hit a major problem which of course is that this animal not only lives in trees—nobody has seen it for years and years and years—lives in trees but it’s also a nocturnal animal. And the quality of batteries in Madagascar is very very poor. So, we spent night after night after night, traipsing through the rainforest, in what can only be described as: the rain. (Laughter.)

Getting rather ratty, and basically we’ve just spent night after night sort of huddled under tarpaulins, looking at us, saying “stop raining.” And every now and then we would sort of, “gah, I’ve been trying to find this damn animal.” Actually, this is wonderful, we found this hut that used to be this sort of game warden’s—not game warden—a ranger’s hut. And it’s a tiny little hut. And it was actually full of wild life. (Laughter.) What happened, you see, is you would open the door, and you hear all this noise (makes chomping noises) and you turn on the light and it would all stop. (Laughter.) And you would see these little giant spiders around the wall, each with a sort of half-eaten bug in their mouth! (Laughter.) And say, “yes?” (Laughter.) And you turn the light out and (makes chomping noises).

So this is our shelter, you know, we were having a great time. But one night, one night, we were all sort of—as I said—huddled under our tarpaulins, and I sort of got out, and wandered around, and suddenly, suddenly, I looked up and at a branch at about that high above my head (looks up and jumps to indicate height), this creature came out. This creature came out along the branch, looked down on me, and I looked at it, and as it looked to me—it obviously didn’t at all like to look at what it saw—it turned around and went away again. (Laughter.) Whole encounter about ten seconds. And that’s what we’ve come for.

I had actually seen, we all saw—just managed to get a quick photograph of it when it appeared—but I suddenly realised we’ve seen an Aye-aye. Now, I was absolutely transfixed by that moment, for reasons that I couldn’t entirely explain to myself immediately. Because a month earlier I’ve never even heard of this animal and now here I was, staring at it, thinking that something extraordinary happening here. So I began to sort of think about it a little bit, and the thought I put together was this. In traveling here, in traveling on a 747 to Tananarive, which is the capital of Madagascar, and this terrible old jalopy of an airplane that took us out to the northwest corner, and then in the decreasingly excellent series of carts and trucks, and then in the rotting old hulk that took us to the rainforest where we basically walked through the rainforest night after night, it was as if we were taking a kind of time journey—a time travel journey—back through the history of twig technology. (Laughter.)

And what this encounter had been, what this encounter had been was: I was a monkey looking at a lemur. And you suddenly think, there is a huge amount of history to this moment that we don’t think—we don’t realise—we carry around with us. Our roots in this planet go back an awfully awfully awfully long way, and we don’t tend to think about that very much. And it takes a confrontation like this to suddenly realise how sort of broad and deep your family goes. So I thought, well this is terribly interesting. And I talked to the guy who had been kind of my guide out there, who was a zoologist who had been sent along to make sure I didn’t sort of fall out of the trees and so on. And his name was Mark Carwardine, and I said to him, “I would love it if we could …, do you fancy the idea of sort of going around the world and looking for other rare and endangered species of animals, maybe doing a book about this?” He said, “well, that’s what I do for a living!” (Laughter.) “So yeah, OK.” (Laughter.)

[edit]The Komodo Dragon Lizard
And so we did. Now, there was a pause at that moment because I had a couple of novels I’ve just been contracted to write. So I wrote Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, and then it was time to go. (Laughter.)

And the first place we went, we went to look for a particular animal which is the Komodo Dragon Lizard. Now you know what lizards are like, don’t you? I mean they’re sort of (makes mime with hands to suggest a size of about 12 inches). The Komodo Dragon Lizard is a little bit bigger than that. The biggest one we saw actually it was about 13 feet long, and its head came out to about here (makes mime with hands to suggest a height to about his hip), fucking huge I think is the technical term. (Laughter.) It’s thought to be the origin of the chinese dragon myth—because they are well huge, giant giant lizards, they’re scaly, they’re man eaters, literally they’re man eaters, and they don’t actually breathe fire, but they do have the worst breath of any creature known to man.

And they live on this island called Komodo. Now, it’s not enough—it turns out—that this island has fifteen hundred, fifteen hundred man-eating dragons on it. (Laughter.) It turns our that actually that the most endangered animal on the island is anything other than the dragons. (Laughter.) In fact—as I said—they’re man eaters. They don’t actually eat you sort of straight out, they don’t sort of lunge at you and just gobble you up. They sort of sneak around and they come and give you a bit of a bite. Because their saliva is so virulent that your wound would not heal and after a while you will die. And so one of the dragons will get to eat you—it doesn’t matter if it’s the same one that bit you—they just have a strategy of having as many dead and dying creatures lying around the island (laughter) as they can manage and that kind of keeps them going.

But it turns out it’s not enough that the island has fifteen hundred man-eating dragons on it. Just to make it a little bit more interesting, it also has more poisonous snakes on it—per square meter of land—than any equivalent area of land anywhere on earth. So, we approach Komodo—I have to say—slightly nervously, and in a slightly roundabout way. In fact we approached in such a roundabout way that went by Melbourne in Australia. (Laughter.) And the reason we went by Melbourne was somebody who we wanted to go and see there, a man called Dr. Struan Sutherland. Actually I want to read you a little bit about him, he was a great expert in snake venom.

I should apologise before I read this, actually, for the fact that my australian accent isn’t very good. But then, what the hell, you’re all americans you ain’t know the difference anyway. (Laughter.)

There is in Melbourne a man who probably knows more about poisonous snakes than anyone else on earth. His name is Dr. Struan Sutherland, and he has devoted his entire life to a study of venom.

“And I’m bored at talking about it,” he said when we went along to see him the next morning laden with tape recorders and notebooks. “Can’t stand all these poisonous creatures, all these snakes and insects and fish and things. Wretched things, biting everybody. And then people expect me to tell them what to do about it. I’ll tell them what to do. Don’t get bitten in the first place. (Laughter.) That’s the answer. I’ve had enough of telling people all the time. Hydroponics, now that’s interesting. (Laughter.) Talk to you all you like about hydroponics. Fascinating stuff, growing plants artificially in water, very interesting technique. We’ll need to know all about it if we’re going to go to Mars and places. Where did you say you were going?”

“Komodo.”

“Well don’t get bitten, that’s all I can say. (Laughter.) And don’t come running to me if you do because you won’t get here in time, (laughter) and anyway I’ve got enough on my plate. Look at this office, full of poisonous animals all over the place. See this tank, it’s full of fire ants. Venomous little creatures. What are we going to do about them? Anyway, I got some little fairy cakes in case you were hungry. Would you like some little cakes? I can’t remember where I put them. There’s some tea but it’s not very good. Anyway, sit down for heaven’s sake.

“So, you’re going to Komodo. Well, I don’t know why you want to do that but I suppose you have your reasons. There are fifteen different types of snake on Komodo, and half of them are poisonous. The only potentially deadly ones are the Russell’s Viper, the Bamboo Viper and the Indian Cobra.

“The Indian cobra is the fifteenth deadliest snake in the world, and all the other fourteen are here in Australia. (Laughter.) That’s why it’s so hard for me to find time to get on with my hydroponics, with all these snakes all over the place.

“And spiders. The most poisonous spider is the Sydney funnel-web, we get about five hundred people a year bitten by spiders. A lot of them used to die, so I had to develop an antidote to stop people bothering me with it all the time. (Laughter.) Took us years. Then we developed this snake bite detector kit. Not that you need a kit to tell you when you’ve been bitten by a snake, (laughter) you usually know, but the kit is something that will detect what type you’ve been bitten by so you can treat it properly.

“Would you like to see a kit? I’ve got a couple here in the venom fridge. Let’s have a look. Ah look, the cakes are in here too. (Laughter.) Quick, have one while they’re still fresh. Fairy cakes, I baked ’em myself”

He handed round the snake venom detection kits and these home baked fairy cakes and retreated back to his desk, where he beamed at us cheerfully from behind his curly beard and bow tie. We admired the kits which were small efficient boxes neatly packed with tiny bottles, a pipette, a syringe, and a complicated set of instructions that I wouldn’t want to have to read for the first time in a panic. And then we asked him how many of the snakes he had been bitten by himself.

“None of ’em,” he said. “Another area of expertise I’ve developed is that of getting other people to handle the dangerous animals. (Laughter.) Won’t do it myself. Don’t want to get bitten, do I? (Laughter.) You know what it says on my book jackets? ‘Hobbies: gardening, with gloves; (laughter) fishing, with boots; travelling, with care.’ That’s the answer. What else? Well in addition to the boots wear thick baggy trousers. And preferably have half a dozen people trampling along in front of you making as much noise as possible. (Laughter.) The snakes pick up the vibrations and get out of your way. Unless it’s a Death Adder, otherwise known as the Deaf Adder, (laughter) which just lies there. People can walk right past it and over it and nothing happens. I’ve heard of twelve people in a line walking over a Death Adder and the twelfth person accidentally trod on it and got bitten. Normally it’s quite safe to get twelve in line. You’re not eating your cakes. Come on, get them down you, there’s plenty more in the venom fridge.” (Laughter.)

We asked, tentatively, if we could perhaps take a snake bite detector kit with us to Komodo.

“Course you can, course you can. Take as many as you like. Won’t do you a blind bit of good because they’re only for Australian snakes.”

 

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