Threatened by Eliot Schrefer (review)

Luc, a Gabonese AIDS orphan who expects to be indebted forever to the corrupt man who paid his deceased mother’s hospital bills, seizes an opportunity to pilfer a metal suitcase, hopefully full of money, from an Arab man in a street cafe. The plan doesn’t work quite the way he intended: “Professor” Abdul Muhammad of the University of Leipzig instead pays off Luc’s creditor on the condition that Luc accompany him as a research assistant in his study of chimpanzees in a remote region of Gabon. Luc’s no angel and knows a scam when he sees one, but he figures he will re-steal the suitcase and abandon Prof as soon as he can. What Luc doesn’t count on is his growing bond to the shady researcher who is clearly not all he claims to be, and to the chimpanzees that Luc has been taught to fear all his young life. As in Endangered (BCCB 1/13), Schrefer focuses on the delicate, fraught nature of contact between humans and their primate kin and conveys in vivid detail the individual and communal behaviors that seldom enjoy such rich, unanthropomorphized treatment in fiction. Luc’s and Prof’s marginalized status within their own cultures demands thoughtful comparison with the chimpanzees that struggle to define their roles in the group, but Schrefer respectfully declines to turn the chimps into mini-mes with recognizably human emotion and motivation. Readers are again treated to a thought-provoking study of endangered creatures—both the poached and hunted chimpanzees and the exploited and neglected children with little hope. Notes on Gabon and on Schrefer’s research are included.