At the heart of every good story, it’s been said, is a mystery. For us in Malaysia, there is probably no mystery more haunting than that of someone walking into the thick, green, tangled depth of one of our jungles, never to be seen again.
In Carl Hoffman’s The Last Wild Men Of Borneo, the central mystery is Bruno Manser, the young Swiss who turned up in Sarawak in the mid-1980s, lived among the Penan people for nearly two decades, adopted their nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle, drew public attention as an anti-logging activist fighting for the preservation of the Penan’s traditional lands and way of life, and who, one day in early 2000, walked into the jungle and vanished without a trace.
