Title: Taller Than Trees
Author: Roger Young
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 978-1-4772-8655-5
Pages: 708
Genre: Historical Fiction / Action Adventure
Reviewed by: Joe Kilgore
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Taller Than Trees is an audaciously grandiose epic that erupts explosively and spews copiously detailed history plus rip-roaring adventure from first page to last. Or, at least the last of this initial book, which promises another to follow.
An engaging story is at the heart of this novel, which too frequently is set aside for forays into philosophical debate that make Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor sequence in The Brothers Karamazov seem brief by comparison. The essence of law and justice, right and wrong, harmony and disharmony, freedom and servitude, plus ethics, morality and reason, slither their way from page to page threatening to make eyes glaze over. Fortunately, the author keeps coming round to the tale on which the axis of his novel turns and continually jolts the reader back into the swing of things.
The setting is Central Africa in 1913. A Rhodesian policeman feels compelled to break up an after-hours drinking party being attended by a different branch of the constabulary. A wild brawl ensures. It leads to a disciplinary action that sends the policeman, Willoughby, on a patrol in the bush that is ill considered, fraught with peril, and highly unlikely to succeed. He’s to find and apprehend a legendary criminal, van Rooyen, who readers eventually come to learn, is not what he seems. It is in fact the interplay between these two forces of nature that form the heart of this tale. Willoughby is a bear of a man, van Rooyen, a jungle cat. First they are adversaries, then allies, eventually friends who leap from Young’s pages like cutouts in a popup book marauding their way through adventures with brawn, brains, skill and courage.
Africa, in all its majesty, is the other central character of this novel. Its violent history, its unforgiving environment, its adaptable inhabitants (both animal and human) are keenly and memorably depicted. Young brings them all to life in vivid and memorable ways. There’s a breathtaking sequence of van Rooyen hunting elephant on horseback that surges with danger yet flows with grace. There’s a hilarious tête-à-tête onboard a speeding railcar between a drunken Willoughby, a supercilious bureaucrat, and the policeman’s superior that will have you laughing out loud.
Eventually, the plot of the novel proceeds to disreputable Queenstown where brigands rule and Willoughby decides to enact a decidedly unorthodox approach to maintaining law and order. But at what cost?
Indeed, Young shows himself not only to be an accomplished writer, but also a keen observer and talented chronicler of the human condition. His characters are as fascinating as they are credible. Heroes, villains, damsels in distress, women of the world, warriors, martinets—they all populate this epic tale and make it an experience readers won’t soon forget. If you like your novels big, bold, and long, this one may well be for you.
