It’s taken me ages to read this book, nearly three weeks, and it’s only 390 pages long. It’s partly because I’m also reading other things as well but it’s also I kept getting distracted by the other issues the book raises. It’s not just a memoir of an eccentric adventurer who was murdered in a remote area of Pakistan, and it’s not just a travel book. It’s also a book that plays with the conventions of these genres.

Jordi Magraner was an adventurer who fell in love with the Hindu Kush, and, it seems to me, at different times varied his reasons for being there. He was a student of the natural world, and heard stories about the legendary barmanu – known to most of us as the yeti – and he set off to see if he could find it. But for quite long periods of time, he got involved in other quests as well…

The author would have his readers believe that the quest for the barmanu/yeti is not as crazy as it seems.

One day in 1949, a doctor of zoology called Bernard Houvelmans opens the Saturday Evening Post and reads an article entitled ‘There May Be Dinosaurs’. He’s wary when he sees that it’s signed by a writer he trusts. Then, amid the claims made in the text, he reads the names of researchers he also considers serious, and by the end he has found that he needs to look into the information.

Seven years later, he publishes On the Track of Unknown Animals, introducing a series of animals discovered to date in the twentieth century. Most of them are pretty big. There you’ll find the okapi, the coelacanth, the Paraguayan peccary, the pygmy hippopotamus, the Cambodian wild ox, and the Komodo dragon.

Heuvelmans is a scientist, he considers himself a scientist, the animals he writes about exist ‘in reality’, but he has demonstrated that many of them were only located after conversations with indigenous people who gave assurances of their existences by recounting stories, describing them. Before they were discovered, these animals were no more than legends to westerners, or the victims of extinction. In which case why should we not believe other stories told about fugitive beings? (p.32)

I was immediately distracted by the thought that in this era of fake news, would we believe it if there were reports of a yeti being found in the mountains of the Hindu Kush? Perhaps that would depend on where the reports came from. If trusted sources like the ABC and the BBC reported it, would we believe it? Or would we think that they were sincere but had been hoodwinked? Would we disbelieve it altogether or would we accept the revelation that the mythical creature had turned out to be real?

How you respond to this idea depends on whether you think we have mapped our world fully or whether you think that just as other species have been found in remote uncharted places, a yeti might possibly exist.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/07/04/in-the-land-of-the-giants-by-gabi-martinez-t... ( )