Brazilian Adventure Book

This is the third book I've read by Fleming and probably the most amusing. In 1932, Fleming sets off on a whim to join an expedition going to Brazil to search for a missing explorer. Many other groups have tried to find him (or, more accurately, his remains, as almost everyone agrees he's probably dead), but the group Fleming joins has new information and is confident of their chances.

What follows is a comedy of errors that ends with nothing having been discovered and very little achieved short of a lot of amusing anecdotes I'm sure Fleming dined out on for weeks. Fleming is witty as always, and there are so many funny characters, not the least of which is Fleming's nemesis Major Pingle (not his real name) who is the nominal head of their expedition, but ends up an enemy. The final section, in which Fleming's tiny group tries to outrace Pingle's to the ship that will carry them back to England, is tense and exciting as well as very funny.

Fleming's casual racism--totally a product of his time--is again on display, but once again he turns out to be more of a classist than a racist, respectful of certain native tribes and scathing in his condemnation of many white Brazilians. Queiroz, their permanent guide, comes in for criticism only once, and it has nothing to do with his race. And I felt Fleming's frustration with the men he encountered who simply would not give him a straight answer about when they would depart a particular place. He never comes out and says that he feels British honor and honesty are superior, but he doesn't need to, because it's implied everywhere. It was interesting to note how often those obstructions only worked on Fleming because of his sense of British honor. I wondered what the story would have been like if the explorers had been native Brazilians dealing with native Brazilians.

The best part was definitely the last: Fleming and his friends had broken with Major Pingle, who was a total jerk, interfered with their mail, refused to return their money to them...the list goes on. In the end, they realize if they can beat Pingle to the city where the ship is leaving from, they can bypass some of his interference. But it turns into a race to spite the man as much as to get their stuff back, and it was very exciting to watch them making progress, then being held up, then making progress--it made up for some of the slow pacing of the earlier parts. Fleming tells a good story, and that's enough to make up for the book's flaws.