Stalking the Bird of Paradise Strikes a Funny Bone – and a Shrunken Head or Two

Aug. 16, 2010 - PRLog -- After returning from an expedition to Papua New Guinea, geographer/ecologist/author Dennis Foster was inspired to write a novel about just such an isolated land untouched by modern civilization, populated by Stone Age tribes. He came up with the concept of a hut-to-hut saleswoman who, wandering uninvited into the remote highlands, becomes mistaken for a jungle spirit and unwittingly becomes the "queen of the cannibals."
    He shared his manuscript with his literary agent, Elizabeth Pomada, who praised the writing but offered: "It's not funny."
    To the author, at the time, the novel wasn't meant to be funny. To his way of thinking, it was "an adventure/horror-type story."
    "But you're at your best when you're being funny," his agent insisted. "Anyway, how can this story be anything but funny?"
    The final, "funny" rendition of Stalking the Bird of Paradise is an enjoyable story, indeed. Intelligent, witty, and genuinely original, it is a parody of every adventure book and movie ever made, and also of pyramid sales schemes, snobby scientific dissertations, and abstruse geographic essays.
    The tongue-in-cheek adventure story is based on the premise that a "normal" girl from Iowa, pursuing her personal fortune as an "Amerdream" franchisee becomes hopelessly lost on a remote island inhabited by Stone Age tribes whose idea of high fashion consists of skinned and dried animal bones worn crosswise through the nasal septum, or, in more extreme cases, coats of living leeches. That is, until Judy Hemingway arrives, with her cache of "stackable polystyrene kitchen containers" and "affordable rainbow-colored cosmetics,"  which rapidly become the Stone Age fashion trend du jour.
     The enterprising saleswoman's debauched Australian pilot had warned her not to "go traipsing off into the highlands, where life is cheap and uninvited guests are fed their own fingers and toes as hors d'oeuvres." Nevertheless, the still-fresh memory of her standing in a driving rain, her drenched clothes clinging to her like a second skin, is enough to send him on a suicide search-and-rescue mission into the forbidding jungle. Who knows? he ponders. He might find one or two of her kitchen container merchandise samples, which, unlike her, are mostly inedible.
    As might be expected from the author of two geography textbooks and The World Guide, Dennis Foster's witty novel subtly explores issues of cross-cultural understanding and exploitation of indigenous people, while parodying the popular adventure genre of cinema and fiction.
    Dennis Foster, 62, has earned international acclaim as an author, computer scientist, artist, geographer, ecologist, researcher, and humorist. He is the author of more than 60 published books, including two bestsellers. His artwork has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, the Phoenix Art Museum, and others. He lives in Hawaii on the Kona coast of the Big Island.

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