An absorbing story, reminiscent of the social commentary of Somerset Maugham and Evelyn Waugh. With the trained eyes and the sensitivity of someone who lived among the orangutans in the wilds of Borneo, Sochaczewski tells a captivating story of the struggle to save the rainforests. The action is fast and furious, the cat and mouse chases between the Penan and the timber workers are great, the blowpipes with poison darts are rife and the encounters with the orangutans are magnificent, funny and at times terribly sad. Numerous news reports resonate with the fictional people and situations in Redheads, a comic eco-adventure novel by Paul Spencer Sochaczewski. Redheads is about a Swiss shepherd who encourages the tribal Penan of Borneo to rebel against timber companies that are destroying the Penan forest homeland, schizophrenic orangutans facing extinction in the wild, orangutan researchers who will do almost anything to keep their work permits, and corrupt government officials in the fictional Sultanate of Manusia.
Redheads is fiction, but the conservation issues in Borneo are real.
Manser avoided arrest with the panache of a Swiss Robin Hood. When he left Sarawak in 1990, through Brunei, he returned to Switzerland to create the non-profit Bruno Manser Fonds, which fights for tribal rights and an end to logging. In 1999 he returned to Sarawak and paraglided onto the front lawn of Sarawak Chief Minister Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud. Manser offered Mahmud a truce in exchange for the government creating a biosphere reserve for the Penan. The Swiss man with the impish grin and John Lennon glasses was deported.