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Review: Tiger, Tiger by Mel Keegan

Bukeroo Bonsai


With each masterstroke, Mel Keegan paints a rich portrait of a near-future world which is alarmingly familiar. Picture, if you will, the last wilderness in the world. Humans have covered the globe like a virus, species everywhere are but a memory, cities have sprawled across the continents. You travel to the end of the world, literally, to find the last tract of wilderness: a place called the Tarkine.

And it's a real place, in the northwest of the island of Tasmania, just off the southern tip of Australia. In TIGER, TIGER, this part of the island is privately owed, which means it can't be logged, turned over to "pine plantations," mined, turned into a celebrity vacation resort, or another city. It's owned by a very old man who's still on a mission: preserve the last surviving fragment of the wilderness ... and preserve real, genuine live tigers. In this tiny patch of paradise live the park rangers who safeguard the Tarkine and the tigers.

Without delay, you meet Sonny and Alec. Warning: be prepared to fall in lust, if not in love! And into this snipped of paradise come the villains ... the gene smugglers, whose industry will make your blood run cold (if it doesn't there's something wrong, all your spark plugs are not sparking).

The text is quite brief (the book is 136pp, with gorgeous illustrations) but the story is amazingly complex, and so richly detailed, you might read it in an afternoon but you will be haunted by it for weeks. This reviewer could happily spend a whole novel's worth of reading time in this "Keegan future," and has read TIGER, TIGER several times. Heroes, villains, exotic locations, gay romance (and sex) ... and of course, tigers. What more could you wish for? As an artist, Mel Keegan has evolved in recent years. The "Master of Gay Thrillers" (Millivres) has become the Master Craftsman. Consider me subscribed.

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