About This Book
Cannibals in the Garden is a tale of outrageous and comic business chicanery in The Republic of Congo. This is the story of a pair of ingenious, if deeply inept Americans, with a scheme to bilk elderly, rich and cranky tourists with cataracts thick as ice cubes. They guide them on green safaris in a manicured few acres of sterile rain forest. The forest is imbued with immortal toxins spread long-ago by a UN team led by a man with a pathological hatred for picnic ants. The forest is safer than a baby crib. The protagonists are twins, brother and sister. They are sophisticated and ambitious. They nail stuffed leopards to tree branches; they install hidden speakers that blurt the recorded mating cries of bull elephants in the Berlin zoo; Japanese-made vinyl replicas of giant South American anacondas are epoxied to tree trunks—thus provoking delighted squeals of terror from their sensation-starved elderly clients. The halt and half-blind pay a thousand dollars a day for the five-day faux-safaris. Net profit is ninety-percent of the take. The brother is Harrison, a bright but dour tropical botanist who needs some big money, fast. Monica, his sister, is a movie star-attractive, salaciously flip and rich young Chicago widow who provides financing. Bored, she joined Harrison, not least because most of the members of her revisionist Great Books group thought Homer was the nickname of a hot Yankee batter. They also voted to sacrifice Plato for Ayn Rand. In the Congo, they recruit a safari staff from refugee camps. Here they find talented Africans who reluctantly role-play menials—at first. And the venture commences to prosper. But a few tsetse flies begin to appear in the ointment: the aged safari clients are touchy; some become phobic, wondering if the dying forest is inhabited by cannibals fond of stringy meat. An association of half-mad elephant semen conservationists suspect Harrison and Monica of molesting a hidden herd of pachyderms. Complicating matters, an oil consortium discovers a giant dome of petroleum under the landscaped safari paths in the prop-strewn rain forest. Problems begin to multiply. So do the huge multi-colored orchids that Monica planted alongside the cane-poked paths used by the shuffling clients. The orchids put down roots and began to run riot. The orchids are vinyl creations from a plastics extruder in Hong Kong. Deciding to impose control, Monica confidently concocts an ad hoc conflict-resolution scheme composed of half-remembered axioms from some murky course she'd taken in business school. This brings all of central Africa to the verge of a terrible internecine war. The resolution of the conflict, along with the destinies of Monica and Harrison, involve the near-disintegration of the United Nations and most of their inhabitants. But in the end, love and peace reign once again—more or less.
