Item - Search for the Mountain Gorillas

This book is the author's first and is apparently based partially on his real-life experiences. For some reason I failed to find the book terribly engaging, though it's well-written and has some good moments. Perhaps the problem is simply that this book isn't nearly as outlandish as the last few and feels too restrained in comparison. It might also be that the reader has very little control in the story; often your choices involve who to follow rather than where to lead people, and quite a few major events happen without allowing you any input.

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I found this impossible to really get into.
There's few action parts, which get cut too short.
Rating: 2/10

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Search for the Mountain Gorillas is one of the few Choose Your Own Adventure books in which your character is an adult instead of a teenager. This book has you playing a photo journalist for the African Naturalist magazine who has been assigned to do a picture story on the endangered mountain gorillas in the Impenetrable Forest of Uganda. The purpose of the outcome of your assignment is to raise awareness and, consequently, funds to help establish a preserve, a sanctuary of sorts, for the few remaining mountain gorillas facing constant threats from hunters and herdsmen alike.

It was noticeable that, for a book based in a location as remote as a jungle, you come across a wide cast of human characters. Consequently, this book explores more types of different human dynamics than one would expect. From the very beginning you team up with a zoologist from the University of East Africa and a gorilla tracker (whose association is indeterminable from a reading of the book). You additionally come across park rangers, poachers, and even a film crew. Having personally never been to a jungle expedition of the sort that is the subject of this book, I am reluctant to say that your interactions with these vastly different groups of people are realistic. However, I can confidently say that your interactions are very different with members of each of these groups. The characters definitely have at least a shallow degree of depth to them; they are concerned with very different things and you learn very different things from them.

This book provides introductory insight into the sorts of things that park officials are concerned with: insufficiency of funds to build and maintain viable sanctuaries for endangered species, insufficiency of public support to help the parks meet their objectives, offers from zoos based in prosperous countries that run contrary to the park’s mission, bureaucratic corruption, and illegal hunting to name just a few. At the same time, on the other side of the coin, you also get a glimpse into the desperation of the locals. Destitute, squalid, and faced with limited opportunities to feed their families, some locals inexorably become poachers—they can apparently profit very handsomely by capturing and illegally selling baby gorillas. While the book surely discusses the illegality of poaching and the prospect of prison for the perpetrators, I can’t help but wonder whether imprisonment is an appropriate or sufficient deterrent if the underlying problem of poverty due to a lack of economic opportunity is never solved. The ethics and legality of poaching are definite philosophical implications of this book.

Getting to the book’s narrative storytelling, you are able to successfully complete your expedition in a minority of the endings. In others, you get to read about yourself falling short in many varied ways. Though this is a work of juvenile fiction, the bad endings, as is characteristic of children’s books of the era, routinely offer much to an adult’s jaded sensitivities. For example, you can read about how a poacher stabs you with his spear (pg. 86), how a blade-fitted hunting trap impales you (pg. 65), how a water buffalo gores you (pg. 116), and how a leopard mauls you (pg. 48). That said, the sense I got after reading this book was that the greatest dangers in jungles near human habitation are probably nothing more than the excessively ordinary human-designed booby traps meant to ensnare wildlife.

Search for the Mountain Gorillas has an excessively National Geographic quality to it; it reads more like a documentary than how other gamebooks read, like a movie. Given that the About the Author section explicitly states that Jim Wallace went on a mountain gorilla expedition during his three-year stint in Uganda, it stands to reason that this book is his offer of a travelogue to the world. The book has quite a bit of educational value to it if the information it contains is either somehow useful to the reader or is otherwise (at least) sufficiently interesting. For example, I learned about the formation of boiling steam geysers in crevasses (pg. 95), matsuko meadows (pages 35 and 51), and of the diet and nesting habits of mountain gorillas through this book.

Search for the Mountain Gorillas is internally highly consistent, which is normally a plus for gamebooks. But, in this case, because all the branching stories were very similar to one another, I felt that it only ever managed to strike a single note which made it quite monotonous. This book suffered from a lack of variety and a gamebook need not be only internally inconsistent to accomplish this. I suspect that this was the reason why I struggled keeping track of the narrative branches that I was coming off of in this book. I normally don’t have trouble with this.

Search for the Mountain Gorillas offers a straightforward story that is almost a journalistic account. It’s not completely devoid of excitement but it’s not particularly fun. It’s ultimately, as stated earlier, a travelogue that is capable of being imaginative only within the narrow scope that defines it. I don’t have it in me to say that it’s a bad book though I will say that it is undoubtedly slightly below par, notwithstanding Ron Wing’s solid artwork.

Rating: 4.5/10.0

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