Pregnant Toni has a possession-like experience in which some matriarchal lemur spirit speaks of enigmatic development potentials and the loss of her island home. Witnessing increasingly bizarre events around the Timeline at Greenwich's old Royal Observatory, Toni encounters trampish Australian Doctor Boolawuy and a well-groomed English businessman the Englishman holding the freshly slaughtered body of Boolawuy's aye-aye companion, one of a disappearing lemur species. Two Afro-British orphans are caught up in the ensuing energy struggle, which escalates around the aye-aye's remains, the Observatory's Time Ball and a sound-making metamorphosing contraption. Abducting one of the children, the Englishman disappears into a howling vortex. As the others set about pursuit, a vision-plagued aye-aye embarks on a quest across the last canopies of Madagascar. Recounting horrors and a rescue endeavour that crosses continents and centuries, LEMURIAN SHUNTS is a reality-buckling odyssey. From London and a Madagascan rainforest in 2000, it shifts to 1666 to the throes of slave trading and piracy; cyclonic firestorms and brain experiments and living echoes of a 'lost' equatorial continent... Disparate threads interweave in a wild and challenging story, resonant with deeper explorations of the worlds we know.*********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************Character & Nature: "Lemurian Shunts is a gamely anomalous story that aims to entertain and unsettle, to move and critically engage. Shifting between genres, it has elements of historical adventure thriller, science fiction, surrealism, mysticism, fantasy, metaphor and comedy. Human perception and human rights alongside issues relating to different species and environments are key themes. Surreptitiously geared towards drawing readers into questions of connectedness, of potential, of 'development', from the personal to the global, the story delves into the chronically understated and subtly underlying. At the centre of the novel's cast of characters is a pregnant Latin American, a blind old Aboriginal Australian doctor from a distant future, Afro-British orphans, Malagasy and other African insurgents, and hardened seafarers led by a pathological if enigmatic Englishman. Along with the human characters, the story features visionary, mentally disturbed and neurally modified lemurs, besides some of Madagascar's extinct megafauna such as the legendary Elephant Bird. The material has a mix of subtler and more explicit links with grim but internationally little known facts relating to Madagascar, such as mass abductions of the Malagasy by the English at the time of transatlantic slave trading; recurrent plague impacts; chronic deforestation and wildlife extinctions; poverty- and trade-driven harvestings of endangered species; exploitation of mineral resources including heavy oil and tar sands, with major threats to health, livelihoods, environments... Big western corporate predators interested in various forms of resource extraction are to be seen today making moves on the island, such that while a small elite get richer, the majority of Madagascar's people get all the poorer and the situation for the island's species besides humans steadily and dramatically worsens. All too symbolic of that, and like a candyfloss smoke screen, M A D A G A S C A R is best known to many in the west for a blockbuster fortune-spinning cartoon movie series bearing its name but which has virtually nothing to do with it. With its blistering swirl of perspectives, Lemurian Shunts sets out to turn things otherwise."
About the Author: Narindra Lé Ranaivo was saved from life on the streets of Madagascar's capital by the Akany Avoko refuge. Following vocational training and explorations of Malagasy traditions, she helped develop community-based projects protecting health, rights and biodiversity. Always the holistically engaged activist, she worked for many years on initiatives in the island's remaining forests - an unsung heroine among Madagascar's many unknowns. Mal Mitchell has pursued diverse paradigms of 'inner' and societal change. He has counselled people with mental health problems, assortedly campaigned, and worked widely in alternative education. From 2000 to 2015 he worked with charity-NGO Azafady in support of sustainability and capacity building in Madagascar. Today Mal continues with writing and research. Published work: Besides writing articles for the New Internationalist and other development-focused journals, Mal has contributed material to the World Rainforest Movement's 'Africa: Forests Under Threat', published in 2002; also in '02 Ashgrove published his multivalent narrative 'The Hog's Wholey Wash'.