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An Irish boy of seventeen, who has only ever seen one African face to face, drives with his grandfather from Dublin to the Cape of Good Hope on a Quixotic love-quest. It is 1961.
The grandfather is six foot four and his grandson thinks he looks like Gary Cooper, even if he behaves like that man Don Quickshot. Although his wife has died, the old man will seek an annulment in Rome so that he can honestly say he never married. Then he will drive to the Cape to marry his first sweetheart. He takes his elephant gun and six Zippo lighters and his grandson, who would prefer to stay at home in Dublin and listen to Radio Luxembourg 208, Station of the Stars, and read Mad magazine. The grandson is curious to know what is a clitoris, a word he has just discovered by accident. You will know about Queen Dido, and the hero Aeneas who chose duty over love. Stanyhurst made an eccentric translation of Virgil in which these lovely words sum up the sorry tale:
“Her wound fed by Venus, with firebait smouldering. His words, fitly placed, march mastering through her heart. All in her breast deeply she prints.” This is the seed and the theme. There are also echoes of Don Quixote, Ulysses, The Lady from Shanghai, The African Queen, and many other tales and movies that the boy uses to interpret the strange events he experiences. His cousin Willy, whom he meets for the first time at Lake Tanganyika, seems to be running guns to South Africa. There is civil war in the Congo. The biggest shock for the boy is his first encounter with open racism, in South Africa, when he sees the sign that says WHITES ONLY, and a woman who says, "I can be any colour you want, but if you put a chameleon on a tartan rug it will die of exhaustion."
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