The Man Who Loved Crocodile Tamers

​Title: The Man Who Loved Crocodile Tamers
Author: Finuala Dowling
Publisher: Kwela
I wept when I finished this book. Not just because I had finished it. Though it was that too. It was a long and intense book which kept me sustained for a long stretch, and became a friend. I had to keep stopping to re-read a sentence, reflect a while its deeper or double meaning. To breakaway and  look up a word. Penumbra for instance, while you might know what it means, how skillful its 

​use in a phrase. Occasionally I lost the thread of the story by getting so caught up in the words. It’s been pointed out that the author is a poet, by which you might think her work might be flowery, filled with mystic analogy. But it isn’t that so much as the way she places words alongside one another: ‘There was nothing wrong with his body, except that a feeling that a clawed creature from prehistory had it pinioned.’ (That’s not necessarily the best example, but as a I scanned back to find you one, I kept getting caught up again reading). Wait – I just found another one: ‘I lay on my bed aching, my spirits scraping the loose pebble bed at the bottom of my soul.’ Okay, that one might be a bit poety, but hey – is it not truly evocative. It is the very architecture of her sentences, paragraphs – the construction of the whole book really - that’s been so very thoughtfully crafted. With knowledge. And experience.
I wept for that too – the knowledge, the experience. All the little, and big, things that she has clearly learnt and absorbed growing up – I love it that she remembers Vandy saying that something or someone had ‘gone for a Burton’ – no one says that anymore. That she refers to the feather in yankee doodles cap that looks like macaroni – though the image it accompanies of intestines seeping from a dead man’s body is a haunting one. I tried hard to shake it off.
I wept for the dialogue – though sometimes I laughed, or nodded in approval at its nuance or irony. She is a listener, is Finuala. Not for just what and the way in which something is said, but for what else is unsaid. Or implied – hinted at or hidden. ‘I am under no obligation to use my genius’ said Paddy. ‘How very dramatic of you,’ said Vandy. ‘What an excellent moment for a prop.’ Again, perhaps not the best examples, but it was fun running the search.
I wept and shook my head in amazement at the depth of research. Who, of this generation can know the horrors of WWII battlefields (though God knows we will have enough images of Ukranian devastation to last to eternity). But it’s not just Paddy’s battle with battle, and its aftermath, that she has put her mind through – it’s old schools and churches, hospitals and circus tents, it’s even advertising agencies and the downtrodden of Marseille. The streets of London and bars of Cape Town. It’s also a reference library of book titles from the past – The Plague and I, The Alexandria Quartet, Jude the Obscure, Moominland Midwinter, agonizingly an outdated Writer’s & Artists Yearbook…a magazine called Outspan and an even more old-fashioned women’s radio programme. And that’s not to mention music bristling with nostalgia – Greensleeves, Neil Young’s Heart of Gold – Jaques Brel’s If We Only Have Love. Sorry, at this point, I might just weep again. You will find out why when you read it yourself.
I realise I have told nothing of the story of The Man Who Loved Crocodile Tamers,  but honestly to trot out what it’s about would most certainly be to understate the plots windings. Finuala herself gave a presentation on How This Novel Came About which I was lucky enough to attend. It was not a straight path, and there were many avenues leading off, back and forth. But the kernel was the fact that her own father had once loved a Crocodile Tamer (though in fact they were alligators) called Koringa. An eccentric wench, with whom he had once been infatuated, and who later appeared at the church to threaten his wedding to his new love, Vandy. It’s an indelible nugget of real-life family legend that no writer could resist. But it is a story of many layers and Finuala has worked her way through all of them in search of the truth - perhaps finding it, perhaps creating it  - but certainly unearthing a lot more besides.
Perhaps the most endearing components of the books construction are the Fragments from a writer’s diary. These are interspersed between the chapters that start in Salisbury Plain, 1917, and weave across the world through a host of other destinations like Harrogate and Leicester, 1928, Khataba, Egypt 1943 to The Farm, Lakeside 1966 closing in Kalk Bay, 1976. They are not Finuala’s own diary fragments she insists – but those of the writer who is putting together this book with Doubt sitting on the chaise longue, the opinions of her siblings and her own inner voices with which to contend. These fragments are revealing and priceless and make you want to rush at her, or not her, with a reassuring hug. ‘How can you ever be sure another piece of cutting, adding or rephrasing wouldn’t improve it?’ Feel her pain. Feel her poetry. Read her book.