BEST BOOKS ON... THE JUNGLE

OBVIOUSLY, the contestants are in it for the money and the added exposure to flagging careers. But even for those incentives, the television show I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here strikes me as a hardcore, potentially hazardous, undertaking.

For any D-lister now wondering whether to follow in the footsteps of Boy George, Matt Hancock, Mike Tindall (and, er, the others) and journeying into the Australian rainforest, I can offer you a hairraising bedtime reading list.

The fact is, there is only one lesson to be drawn from fiction set in jungles, and that is: you may not come out alive. Even if you do come out alive, you may be altered unrecognisably, like Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness, whose last words are ‘The horror! The horror!’

In Hanya Yanagihara’s recent novel To Paradise, Wika, a native Hawai’ian of royal descent, rejects American culture as colonialist and retreats to family’s last section of scrubby land, known as the Dark Forest, or alternatively the Forest of Paradise.

But pampered, Americanised Wika has fallen too far from the skills of his forefathers to be able to survive there. When his family eventually intervene, he has grown dangerously ill and his companion has died.

Maile Meloy’s breakneck thriller, Do Not Become Alarmed, is a modern riff on Richard Hughes’s A High Wind In Jamaica. Two privileged, naive American families go on a cruise to Central America. One day the mothers and children go ashore, with guides, to a beautiful jungle-fringed beach. Heaven — until the children disappear.

The phrase ‘the law of the jungle’ comes from a poem in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, that lays out the animals’ code of conduct. In Kipling’s stories, it’s both a wild place and one with clearly demarcated geographical and social boundaries.

Mowgli, the boy-cub, can stay with the wolf-pack, but not once he reaches adulthood. ‘Thou art of the jungle and not of the Jungle’ the panther Bagheera tells him. I bet those celebrities, itching for their home comforts, feel the same way.