West of the Moon: A Game Ranger at War Review

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(More customer reviews)Well I think it's fair to say that I was a little non-plussed after reading this one. I had high hopes for it but this should have been titled "A Gay Game Ranger at War." I was very disappointed because this book could have been awesome. Look, if I've got to be labeled a homophobe, then so be it, but this was just ridiculous. I tried to fight through it, but simply could not finish the last chapter. Let me explain. This book is a collection of Selley's reminiscences about growing up in South Africa and eventually working as a game ranger in Rhodesia at the height of the war in the late seventies. The book is roughly divided into halves, the first half being a sampling of his grandmother's diary about life in South Africa between the World Wars. This part of the book was absolutely great! The second half takes up Selley's personal story. This is where things began to go awry. I just never could get comfortable with his casual sexual references to boys in the shower at public school, his not infrequent dalliances with homosexual lovers, and then finally his "shacking up" with the son of one of his drinking buddies. It's not terribly graphic stuff but geez, I wanted to ignore it but just couldn't swim past it. It was totally distracting. I think he could have left out all the sexual innuendoes but even aside from that, Selley makes some incredibly astonishing assertions. First, he asserts that Freidrich Paulus was the only German general to surrender during the Second World War. He meant Field Marshal (but still technically inaccurate). I let the triviality slide thinking things would get better. Later, he asserts that two of his ranger buddies shot down a herd of 22 elephants in less than 60 seconds, each being armed with a double rifle. This was done from the center of the herd in a thicket as elephants apparently circled the shooters! Really? There are more tales like this, equally fantastic, scattered throughout the remainder of the book, these two oddities simply come readily to mind. Perhaps I'm being overly critical, but this one is being packed off to resale.

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West of the Moon - A game ranger at War is a sweeping canvas that evokes a bygone era of the 1940s' colonial Natal through to the cruel intensity of the 'Bush War' that ravaged Rhodesia in the 1970s. The title is in two distinct parts - Part 1 chronicles the author's earlier years - an idyllic childhood spent roaming and hunting among the empty, rolling hills of northern Zululand; of the inaccessible St Lucia waterway; the nostalgia of yellow fever trees; of building railway bridges into the wild interior; of colonial scallywags and native witchcraft; of sugar estates and poaching; of shipwrecks and the sweaty cantinas and backstreets of Lourenco Marques - a time that slipped away. Part 2 recounts the author's move north across the Limpopo where his love of adventure, hunting and the bushveld lead him to Rhodesia. He becomes a game ranger, dealing with 'problem animals' in the farming areas and the escalating terrorist war in the Gona re Zhou National Park in the beleaguered south-eastern Lowveld of the country. Trying to care for an environment and the animals that depend upon it, while the people around commit barbaric acts in the name of political ideology, brutally awakens the author to the reality of the disintegration of an organized colonial subcontinent.

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