Quest in the Desert by Roy Chapman Andrews

From February 14, 2017

I was positively mad about this book when I was in sixth grade. My wife knew that, because I had mentioned it occasionally, during rambles down Memory Lane. So she got it for me for Valentine’s Day.

Roy Chapman Andrews–the first to find dinosaur eggs: explorer, museum director, writer of books that ignited the imagination–was one of my childhood heroes. Quest in the Desert was his only foray into what we nowadays call Young Adult fiction. Having read much of his non-fiction, I can see that a lot of the material in the novel comes from his actual experiences in exploring the Gobi Desert and knocking around Mongolia. No way that’s bad! Andrews had adventures in some pretty wild and woolly places, and knew how to write about them.

As a glorious additional attraction, the book is illustrated by the great Kurt Wiese, who illustrated all the Freddy the Pig books (by Walter R. Brooks). Wow!

China, Mongolia, and the Gobi Desert in the 1920s were not places for the faint-hearted. Andrews loved the people and the land, and as an explorer of the Amundsen school, he always went into the desert well-prepared. He once remarked that for an explorer to have “adventures”usually meant that the explorer didn’t know his business. He did have plenty of adventures, but nothing his expedition was unprepared to handle.

The climax of Quest in the Desert is, of course, purely fictional–the discovery of the long-lost tomb of Genghis Khan (still undiscovered to this day). If you can’t get excited over that, you may need an autopsy.

What a totally wonderful time I’m going to have, reading this again!

P.S.–My Valentine’s gift to Patty was Unnatural Death, one of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries: great stuff.

I can’t imagine a life without books, and I don’t want to try.

Image result for images of roy chapman andrews

Roy Chapman Andrews in the field

I raced through my wife’s gift, Quest in the Desert by my boyhood hero, Roy Chapman Andrews–the story of an expedition to Mongolia in the 1920s, and the wild adventures of the leader and his dog. These are avatars of Andrews and his dog, to whom he dedicated the book; and the adventures are based on his actual experiences.

I was expecting a rip-snorting yarn, and I got one. What I wasn’t expecting was an undertone of sadness that will haunt me for a while.

The Mongolia that Andrews fell in love with is long gone, the world he inhabited is only a memory–and I’m old enough now to empathize with that. My world’s pretty much gone, too, and I don’t much like the one that’s replaced it. And yet there’s more to it than that.

I somehow got the impression of a man who, wherever he went, didn’t quite fit in. Certainly he was needing something that he couldn’t seem to find.

And then, watching some film footage of Andrews’ expeditions, it occurred to me that maybe the wistfulness was in me, not the writer. Watching the black-and-white ghosts of Andrews’ bygone world, I found myself longing for it in some way that I could hardly understand.

I have read much of Andrews’ non-fiction, and now I’ve read his novel, written more than twenty years after he had to leave Mongolia for good, the communist regime having kicked out all the Westerners. And now I think I know what Roy Chapman Andrews was missing–mind you, my conclusion is based only on the words he committed to publication.

There is no sign, in any of this printed work, that the author had any communion with the God who created him, whose Son redeemed him. And looking out on our God-rejecting age–which, with a little bad luck and a lot of stupidity and wickedness, could turn out looking like Northern China in 1926–it makes me think that a human being without God is incomplete, and will never be complete. There is only so far we can go without Him, and that’s not far enough.

Which, I believe, was the broken part of Roy Chapman Andrews. He traveled very far indeed, but never far enough.

From February 20 2017