Exiles by Philip Caputo

Exiles is made up of three fish-out-of-water novels. In The Forest of the Laughing Elephant depicts a small band of American GIs tracking a man-eating tiger who's entered their base camp and dragged off the camp Cook.There is some really clever stuff in this one, written from the point of view of fthe native guide and tracker, Han:

"He came over, rifle flat on one shoulder, his hand on the barrel. Han pointed to the pawprint.
'Jesus.'
'This is the one,' said Han, speaking in his tribal tongue, whick the trung-si understood. 'A big male, moving fast.'
'Jesus.'
The smoke from the trung-si's cigarette hung like camp smoke in the hot wet quiet air.
'He isn't running. Walking, but fast.'
'Jesus Christ.' All the My said that all the time. The white My, the black My. A word from the tongue. Han had no idea what it meant, had never asked. Jesus. Jesus Christ."

But other books and movies kept ringing in my ears while I read this story. You know, the theme of white man dwarfed and tyrannized by the primordial power of jungle growth. There's even a little encounter with a lost French colony, reminiscent of Martin Sheen's in Apocolypse Now. It's unfair though, Joseph Conrad and Francis Ford Coppola certainly shouldn't have exclusive rights to this theme, and Caputo's jungle search is for quite a different thing altogether. There must be some symbolic difference between hunting for a man who lost his nutter in the woods, and hunting for a perfectly sane tiger that chose to make dinner out of army Cook. Also, the author points to some additional lessons of the jungle - about constructs such as time, measurement and language that are nicely done:

"He needed facts.
'Han, how did it cross the river?'
'It swam. Tiger can swim. Or it jumped. Tiger can jump very far.'
'Nothing could swim that river, and its thirty meters across. He's carrying a man weighing one hundred kilos.'
Han was silent, irritated by all the talk about meters and kilos. The My always spoke kilos and meters and the time on their watches. Kilos. Meters. Hours. Jesus.
'Answer me Han. What kind of tiger could jump thirty meters with a big man in its jaws?'
'This tiger, trung-si.'"

Of the other two stories Paradise depicts a small aboriginal fishing community off the coast of Australia, and the events that are in part triggered by the appearance of a mysterious and half-dead castaway. But Standing In was my fave by far. Young working class Dante Panetta finds himself transplanted into the upper crust of New England society after the death of his mother. A dramatic beginning primes us for Dante's upcoming dilemma:

"'Bless me, father, for I have sinned,' he said, and suddenly everything went out from under him - the kneeler, the floor, the earth itself. He was plunging down a bottomless pit, faster and faster, his happiness sucked out of him instantly, replaced by a vertiginous terror as he plummeted, the wind of his passage roaring in his ears.
He woke dangling upside down, like a sleeping bat, in an enclosure as dark and almost as small as the confessional. He heard a drawn-out screech; a foul smell rose into his nostrils. Then, the fog of sleep lifting from his brain, he realized that the screeching was the Silver Meteor's wheels, shrilling on the rails as the train came to a sudden stop in the middle of the night. The violence of the deceleration had almost thrown him out of his upper berth; his legs and feet were tangled in the bedsheets, which were all that had stopped him from falling headfirst into the toilet."

What is truly excellent about this novella is that the author maintains an element of secrecy, or mystery, about Dante's benefactors, only leaking out bits and pieces of their motivation, allowing them to seem slightly sinister in their strangeness. And at the end, when all mysteries are cleared, one question is left unanswered, which leaves the whole tale poised at a moment that I found more sophisticated and satisfying than any resolution could have been. Keen. Neat-o.

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