Caryl Férey, born in 1967, is a French writer, traveler, screenwriter, cinema and comics, specializing in thrillers. He writes dark novels whose action is most often located abroad (Haka, Utu, Zulu, Mapuche, Condor, Paz), also a trilogy with the character of the one-eyed Mc Cash. A Breton at heart living in Paris, the author also writes for music, cinema, theater, radio, youth, and participates in travel magazines or projects for the stage.
Meeting with Caryl Férey for her new novel Okavango, published in the collection “ The Black Series » at Gallimard.
Caryl Férey is not only one of the most brilliant writers today in France and one of the most loved by the general public, but he also has the uniqueness for around twenty years of taking us around the world with his novels which are inspired by countries where he lived. He started with Haka in 1998 ; Then Utu, a diptych which took place in New Zealand, then there was Zulu, born from his stay in South Africa; followed Mapuche, Condor And Paz, a trilogy in Latin America without forgetting Led more recently in Siberia where Caryl Férey went for a major report. In short, he is the travel writer par excellence who embraces the entire planet and who, wherever he goes, observes the specificities of the societies and cultures he discovers.
With her new novel, Caryl Férey returns to the African continent for a detective novel set on the Okavango River which is on the borders of 5 countries
The Okavango is a cross-border river between Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Angola, a particularly rich region for fauna and flora, where there are no less than 36 game reserves which extend over these 5 countries, so it is an area equivalent to that of Sweden, a protection area for wild species desired by Nelson Mandela and which is regulated by KaZa, (the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation) an institution created in 2011, where rangers from the 5 states concerned work together.
A natural, beautiful and wild setting where crimes take place
The novel opens with the suspicious death of an Ovambo, one of the many ethnic groups in the region along with the San and the Khoi, a tracker who can track animals, and who is found poisoned on a private property in Namibia, a murder investigated by a ranger from Botswana named Solanah, a charismatic, impressive woman, who will go to this reserve called “Wild Bunch”, created by a South African John Lantham, a very rich fifty-year-old who puts all his money in the service of animal protection, but which is a bit mysterious.
A novel that sounds the alarm about the disappearance of wildlife in southern Africa
With poaching which targets, in particular, elephants for their ivory tusks, but also rhinoceroses, for economic reasons of course, but above all because of totally false beliefs, such as the increase in virility for men .
A very contemporary investigation where the author also addresses a somewhat forgotten point of history: “ the border war »
It is also the name of the war in Angola which took place between 1966 and 1988, and where the South Africans and the Angolans clashed, battles that were particularly deadly for men, but also for animals.
A writer, very involved in what he denounces, even angry at poaching
Beneath her somewhat ironic appearance, Caryl Férey hides real pain over the fate of the animal world by poachers, here in Southern Africa, but throughout the world, moreover, it is a sorrow that goes back to childhood and who never left him, even as an adult.
Today, he fights in his own way with literature, the dark novel to put his finger on the dysfunctions of man throughout the planet, subjects which affect us all and which should have even more resonance with, perhaps -to be, a cinema version in sight, directed by Jéröme Salle who had already adapted Zulu, the South African novel by the writer and had made a masterful film with Forrest Withaker and Orlando Bloom among others, so to follow if this thriller in turn becomes a feature film, in the meantime the book is worth reading, it is entitled Okavango and it is published in the Série Noire collection by Gallimard.
“Fervently committed to the fight against poaching, ranger Solanah Betwase has the sad habit of coming into contact with corpses and mutilated animal bodies.
Also, when a young man is found dead in the heart of Wild Bunch, an animal reserve on the Namibian border, she knows that her investigation will give her a hard time. Especially since John Latham, the owner of the reserve, quickly reveals himself to be a complex character. Friend or enemy ?
Solanah will have to deal with her doubts and some very bad news: the Scorpion, the worst poacher on the continent, is back on his territory…
The first thriller set in the heart of African reserves, Okavango is also a hymn to the beauty of the wild world and the urgency of letting it live.” (Presentation of Gallimard editions)