Roosevelt's Beast - Louis Bayard (Book Review)

Title - Roosevelt's Beast

Author - Louis Bayard

Summary -

It is 1914, along Brazil's River of Doubt, a band of explorers travel deep into the Amazon. In the party are a father and son of one of America's most powerful families. Theodore Roosevelt and his son Kermit.
But the Roosevelt's become detached from the rest of the group and with Theodore injured, it falls to Kermit to rescue them. Kermit who is plagued with self doubts and an overriding sense of failure must now care for and save his larger than life father.
Alone and captured by the remote tribe known as the Cinta Larga, the Roosevelts bargain for their lives. They are offered a task for their freedom.
They must find and kill the Beast that has been terrorizing the village. A Beast of unspeakable evil.

"...The Beast, though, hadn't left much for the bugs to feast on. Muscle, heart, liver-all were gone. The man had been peeled open and scooped out like a tin of sardines. The only organs that remained were his eyes, and, under the ministrations of heat and bacteria, even these had melted into black craters, staring out of a mustard-colored mask..."

Theodore and Kermit, with only a child and his mother to guide them, go into the jungle to hunt the Beast of the Cinta Larga. But what they find, what they bring back, is a Beast much more powerful than they imagined.

"...Both Cherrie and Rondon were silent for a time. Then the Brazilian looked up.
"You are asking us to lie, Colonel?"
"I am asking you to omit. Surely, amidst the...the infinite gradations of human venality, that particular sin ranks low." The old man kneaded the folds of his throat. "What happened out there belongs out there. The jungle has it; let the jungle keep it..."

Roosevelt's Beast is written out of the history books but never from the thoughts and souls of those who faced it.

Review -

Louis Bayard's talent for re-writing snippets of the past and infusing them with the real people who lived through those times is on full view here. Though slow to begin with, the setting is powerful and the pace quickly picks up and slams into the jungle foliage with all the force and rage of the Beast it projects.
It is Kermit, not his father Theodore, who is the narrator of this grand misadventure. Kermit, so full of self doubt and eagerness to please. Kermit, who must decide if the visions he sees are real or is he descending into the madness that has taken others in his family.
The tale itself weaves in and out of adventure and the supernatural until together they create their own well woven tapestry. Bayard is a master craftsman at this.
Underneath it all there is a mystery. Blood and death. Done by some Beast or by man. This is what Kermit must decide and when he learns the truth, how to deal with it.
Another wonderfully novel by one of the best writer's of our generation.