The Extinction Club Read online

  An empty library would be fine—no assistants in red T-shirts making a noise as they replaced books off the trolley, no readers clogging every table with their heavy books, no librarians ready with a direct-debit form to cover all outstanding fines—just me and the shelves, my metal-tipped shoes ringing and singing off the cast-iron floors of the stack rooms.

  £D

  BRIGITTE ARRANGED for me to meet Lord Howland, Herbrand Russell’s great-great-grandson, in a very expensive fish restaurant. She intimated that only the best would do for Lord H. He was my age, tall, and with that curious complexion you sometimes encounter on very rich men. Their faces have a sort of 3-D effect, as if they are wearing makeup, except they aren’t. It’s as if wealth has provided some secret extra nutrient to their eyebrows and lips, making them stand out in comparison to the pale features of the underpaid, or the ghostly features of the flat broke.

  I became fascinated by his 3-D face and by the way he handled Brigitte; not literally, of course, since her husband was also there, but in his disarming jocularity I detected both politeness and an engaging lack of care. The tiny London world of stress and tube trains and year-end bonuses did not affect him. When I suggested I visit, he said, “Why not come for a month? We had a sculptor down at Woburn for several weeks—he loved it.”

  Next to the phone call that changes your life, the invitation to stay as long as you like at a huge mansion is another key item of wish fulfillment. Unfortunately, I was not in an ideal situation to take advantage of such an offer, what with the sudden looming appearance of fatherhood. But I’d definitely stay for a while, maybe more than once.

  Lord Howland said that he would recommend me to Maja Boyd, the world expert on Milu, who often spent time at Woburn.

  Brigitte paid the bill, which was huge.

  BUSINESS

  THE STYLE of book we were aiming for usually featured men of science from the past who were either the first to do something or else solved some knotty scientific problem.

  All I had to do was turn Père David and the Duke of Bedford into eccentric obsessives, reveal a bit of science in an interesting way, and somehow give the whole thing a global relevance, and we’d be in business, big business.

  Back at my buzzing, humming, whining, crashing computer, things were more difficult.

  DIRT

  THERE WAS no “inside track” on Père David. No dirt, no weirdness. He was a good man, by all accounts, and “good” is hard to do on paper.

  Herbrand Russell, the IIth Duke of Bedford, was slightly more promising. I could cast him as a crazy mixed-up duke—he’d saved a species, but he’d also introduced gray squirrels and muntjac deer into Britain. Muntjac deer were merely an interesting pest, but gray squirrels had driven the native red squirrels into endangered isolation on islands and in the north of England.

  FORGETTING MILU

  IN ANCIENT Chinese literature there is little written about Milu. In A.D. 300 it was recorded that a herd of fifteen hundred swept through the emperor’s camp. Five hundred years later, there was a single reference indicating that the only such deer in existence were incarcerated in a forbidden game park. Sometimes the imperial family even forgot that Milu existed. As a child, the eighteenth-century Emperor Qian Long asked the eunuchs where he might find the animal that sported antlers like those displayed in the palace. He had to wait until he was emperor before the grand eunuch told him that Milu lived in his backyard, so to speak. Death sentences awaited anyone, bar the emperor, who attempted to catch one of these protected deer. There was no profit in even talking about them.

  BLUE PETER

  INOW REMEMBERED an episode of the children’s program Blue Peter I’d seen years before. Over a series of painted stills, one of the presenters—Peter Purvis, I think—had narrated the story of Père David. Père David, or Father David as they called him, had been the real focus of the story, and the Woburn part was not mentioned. Father David was a missionary who loved animals, a sort of modern Francis of Assisi. While China burned during some revolt or other, he sneaked into the Imperial Gardens and spirited away a herd of his beloved deer. He secretly shipped them to a zoo in France. Word then arrived that the remaining deer had all been slaughtered in China and that Father David had saved the species—and to this day they are still called Pere David’s deer.

  It almost goes without saying that Blue Peter was about a thousand times better in those days. There was no irony, no “cool,” no pandering to the imagined attenuation in children’s attention spans. This was before someone decided that all children were thick.

  TOM

  BACK THEN, in the early 1970s, my step-great-grandfather, Grandpa Tom, was nearly ninety. He must have been nineteen or twenty in 1900, when he fought against the Chinese in the Boxer Rebellion.

  Grandpa Tom had a glass eye and a missing finger, the right index finger. Both these deformities were endlessly fascinating to a child of seven. I used to hide under the kitchen table just to be able to get a glimpse of his finger stump when he was sitting down. He never took his glass eye out and it was never referred to. Once, when he was laying the table for lunch, he put the pudding spoons next to the knives. “Not like that!” I piped up. “There’s more than one way to lay a table,” he replied, continuing in his own mysterious way.

  Whenever he traveled, Grandpa Tom traveled light. Ex-soldier that he was, hated carrying anything, so whether he was going for a week or a month, he’d simply pop his razor into his top pocket and be off. If he needed to sleep, he’d sleep in an armchair.

  Grandpa Tom had a wooden box in his caravan, and later, when he moved with my grandparents to a house in Stratford, it rested on the mantelpiece in his room. The box, which was an old-style portable desk, contained medals, old coins, an Argosy paperback, a German-issue Swiss Army knife, and a few photographs. One was of a street scene in Peking, taken just after the Boxer Rebellion. It showed a Boxer having his head chopped off. Behind him you could glimpse other heads in ominous pools of black blood. Grandpa Tom often passed this photo around at Christmas.

  CHINESE MIRROR

  IBEGAN TO notice in myself the same condition I’d observed in others who have to deal with China. It becomes impossible to be impartial. One swings between loving the Chinese and hating them. A kind of fake objectivity can be simulated by swinging back and forth as often as possible, but one is always taking a position. On a personal scale, to know that someone dislikes you has a similar effect—it is hard to be neutral toward them.

  I realized I would have to go to China to see Milu for myself, returned to its native state in the former Imperial Park south of Peking. This travel-book side of the project would make the book exotic and more attractive to publishers, Brigitte said (and I agreed).

  To make the proposal sizzle even more, I filled it with as many interesting facts as I could find.

  My favorite fact was the discovery that the Chinese had a system of volumetric measures that worked by sound. The measures were like scoops made from brass, and each size had a precise tone when struck. In other words, they were like bells that could be used to scoop precious spices, and because a tone could be so accurately determined, they were very accurate measures. If a trader with musical inclinations wanted a certain weight of something, he just hummed the right note. I decided this promising lead should be followed up, so I embarked on a mammoth reading of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China. The gist of this huge work is to demonstrate how the Chinese thought of everything first. It makes dispiriting reading for confirmed believers in Western superiority.

  Père David, it is true, by discovering Milu had saved it from early extinction. And in Woburn, Herbrand Russell had played his crucial part. But before that, the emperor who had placed Milu in captivity had been the first of Milus many saviors. In 1150 B.C., Empress Tanki built a great marble House of Deer, one of the world’s first zoos. Almost certainly Milu would have been among its captives. But this early zoo did not survive long. Neither did Emperor We
n Wang’s Garden of Intelligence, a fifteen-hundred-acre zoo of around 1000 B.C. The unknown emperor who saved Milu had something different in mind. He incarcerated Milu in the Nan Haizi Deer Reserve for the selfish purpose of hunting. Through this simple self-interest he had saved the species for perhaps a thousand years, since all the evidence suggests that Milu had been extinct in the wild for a thousand years when Père David first caught sight of them in the Imperial Park.

  SELLING YOURSELF

  YEARS AGO, just after I left university, I was an insurance salesman for a month. I’d had to pretend I cared more about insurance than I really did. But after a while, I really did start caring about insurance.

  SOLD

  SEVERAL PUBLISHERS had been hooked by Brigitte. I attended meetings where I did my routine. Offers were made. Just when it became necessary to decide which publisher to go with, I had the chance to go on a Ray Mears survival course. Ray Mears probably knows more about survival techniques than anyone else in Britain and I’d wanted to go on one of his courses for years. I borrowed a mobile phone and set off for the woods.

  At night, in my leaf shelter, I made surreptitious calls to Brigitte. Mobile phones were not exactly banned, but Ray Mears ran a tight ship and I sought his approval. If he walked past I hoped he would just think the pressure of having to survive had made me start talking to myself. When I finished my calls I walked past other leaf shelters and heard the low murmur of others talking to themselves, until I realized that everyone had a mobile but was just too embarrassed to admit it.

  We’re on a survival course, learning how to make fire using a bow drill made of sycamore, and we’re phoning home using microwave technology when we think no one is looking.

  Before I went on the survival course I thought that everyone else who went on such courses would be weird, but they weren’t. As a cross section of society the people on the course were actually very sane. The would be survivors were interested in many things, capable, fun to be with, serious when it was necessary to be serious. The only time I sensed a hint of madness was when we were all skinning rabbits, each survivor, including me, trying to impress the others with his willingness to get stuck in without being at all squeamish.

  It was the day after I made fire using the bow drill that Brigitte made the deal. It wasn’t quite as much as I’d hoped in my wildest dreams, but it was still a lot of money. Crouching in my leaking leaf shelter, I spoke with genuine gratitude to Klaudia at Auk Books, who had agreed to publish Milu, as the book was then titled. I called Brigitte and said how amazed I was that we had done the deal. “I’m not amazed,” said Brigitte. “It’s a good idea. Now all you have to do is write it.”

  KLAUDIA

  KLAUDIA WITH a ? was American, from New York. I’m sure she was born somewhere else, but all her references were to New York. She had big glasses with ironically tinted plastic blue frames that made me think of a butterfly having crashlanded on her nose. She was extremely polite and flattering but strangely assertive. If I said something she didn’t like she’d just say, “I think that’s a terrible idea.”

  Klaudia assembled a group of executives from Auk Books to say nice things to me in an office with a round coffee table. I say executives, but actually they were people who had followed very similar trajectories to myself until they were twenty-two or so. Then the divergence began. They drew salaries and had jobs where they decided budgets. I’d never done that. In fact, the last full-time job I’d had had been seven years earlier, driving a delivery van in London.

  But in those intervening seven years I’d become wary of “suits,” “salarymen,” “straights,” “stiffs.” This wariness was partly due to the increasing confidence of the suits I met. When I was just a year or two out of university, the suits had lowly jobs and doubted whether they’d done the right thing. They were the ones eating bitter. But as the years went by, they got more and more interesting and well-paid jobs, whereas I just stayed the same.

  I set aside my envy and hatred of suits in order to charm my way into the Auk Books fold.

  I was glad that Klaudia was American, since Americans are my favorite and most hated people.

  BLAG

  KLAUDIA, A late-twenties editor at a prestigious publishing house, meets ROBERT, an early-thirties writer who has just been signed in an expensive Notting Hill restaurant, KLAUDIA has a terrible flulike cold, and ROBERT is keen to get as much value, i.e., free drinks and expensive dishes, out of the situation as he can. ROBERT is also somewhat nervous (Americans do that to him), and when he is nervous he drinks and smokes to excess. KLAUDIA gamely drinks wine with ROBERT and politely swallows a few whiskeys to help “cure” her cold.

  ROBERT later hears that KLAUDIA has had a complete relapse and spent a week in bed recovering, though, in keeping with her tough persona, she never mentions this to him.

  BLOCKAGES

  THREE MONTHS went by. I was supposed to be busy continuing my research into deer. The signing money took longer than I expected to come through, and my willpower and single-mindedness seemed to be fading. In previous bouts of research I’d been much more ruthless, but this time any excuse pulled me off course. When I had only written about myself it had been easy to keep on track. History was different. Every time I tried to surge forward I just ended up going sideways. It was as if I’d hit this invisible wall and I was just circling it, circling endlessly. For days I wandered deeper and deeper into the forgotten byways of Anglo-Chinese history, discovering Morrison of The Times—the most famous correspondent of his day, a former doctor, who couldn’t manage a word of Chinese—and his one-time assistant, the mysterious Edmund Backhouse, a disgraced scholar/intelligence agent who masterminded a fraudulent diary of the dowager empress. It was Backhouse who promulgated rumors that foreign dignitaries were forced to kiss the naked pudenda of the empress before matters of state could be discussed.

  I read for days, often getting up late and then reading until four or five in the morning, forcing myself back to sleep with a dry mouth and a febrile buzzing imagination.

  I was scheduled to meet Klaudia to discuss my progress with Milu. When I tried to assemble my “progress,” it all spread out sideways and didn’t amount to much. It was just my record of circling that wall, a wall I couldn’t see over, didn’t know what was beyond, didn’t even really know for sure was there. It was like a sci-fi force field repelling me each time I approached. Of course, this kind of talk is not publishing talk. In publishing terms all I’d managed to do was assemble bizarre facts about people who had very little to do with deer.

  The day before our powwow I stayed up late, drinking and thinking. Nothing.

  The next day I had one of those hangovers that are manageable as long as you do not try to think too much. It’s as if the brain is a volcanic crater and you’re just allowed up to the edge, far enough to see a ring of glow and no more. It’s as if thinking can only take place in the outer millimeter right next to the confining skull.

  Skirting around the edge of the crater as I traveled to the Auk offices, I decided that Milu had to be “about” something. The obvious, possibly tabloid, über-theme was extinction. OK, the concern for the deer would be an example of our fear of extinction, which has mushroomed in this century. Mushroomed because of the—yes—atomic bomb. I was ready for the meeting.

  KLAUDIA sits in her tiny office behind a desk piled high with manuscripts. ROBERT sits, well wrapped up in scarves and sweaters, on a plastic chair in front of her. ROBERT is already on his second coffee.

  ROBERT: You see, I asked myself, Why do we care? Why do we care so much about some bird or some insect that’s about to be wiped out forever? Why? Because we’re frightened of our own extinction, as a race. And for the first time since Stone Age times the existence of the human race is under threat. The A-bomb. The H-bomb. We don’t give a toss about insects being wiped out—we’re worried about ourselves.

  KLAUDIA: Absolutely. These are all important themes. But tell me, how do you visualize the cover?<
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  ROBERT: I see an H-bomb exploding. I know it’s a clichéd image, but if we could get a rare photo of, say, a Chinese H-bomb, that would be really good.

  (A beat as the true enormity of the divide between them sinks in.)

  KLAUDIA: DO you know what I see? I see Milu on the cover. Milu is the hero of the book. Milu has to be the star.

  ROBERT: You’re right. Absolutely right. Milu is the star. We can’t pretend he isn’t.

  KLAUDIA: But Milu isn’t Bambi.

  ROBERT: NO. Absolutely not. Not Bambi.

  KLAUDIA: But we need to grab people straight away. So I see you following a hunting expedition in Texas on one of those exotic game ranches you told me about. That’s how the book opens. You watch how some wealthy hunter kills an endangered species.

  ROBERT: Fantastic. We love Milu immediately because we’ve, er, killed him.

  KLAUDIA: Not you. You just have to tag along and observe. Maybe you could cover it for a magazine. One of those men’s magazines you write for.

  ROBERT: It’s brilliant. Start with the deer being killed. Milu is the hero. Père David. Eleventh Duke. Deer returned to China. Fantastic. I think we’re all done. Let’s get some lunch.

  KLAUDIA (looking puzzled) Yes, OK, fine.

  They go to a medium-expensive restaurant for lunch.

  KLAUDIA talks glowingly about a famous Auk Books author who always pays for the wine even if the publisher is buying lunch.

  Despite hearing this, ROBERT again feels constrained to stretch Auk Books’ largesse to the full. He angers the crater of his hangover, which erupts into a throbbing headache somewhere on the train journey home to South London.