"Just then, Panda wondered why. Then he conceived a fascination for spectacles, and hummed a little tune. He held his feet ... "
Is Panda real?
The Panda Chronicles do appear to set out certain features of natural history. Owing to the antiquity of the tales, it is not possible to tell whether these aspects were ever accurate, but in today's world there is no evidence of pandas having a fondness for tunes in E-flat, nor prizing the lop-sidedness of one another's ears. Conclusive evidence of this lies in the fact that no TV documentary has ever said so.
Today's real pandas are ably supported by the efforts of the real people at the Chengdu Research Base for Giant Panda Breeding and other parts of the preservation programme in China. Read more about this valuable work here.
About the Panda Chronicles
The Panda Chronicles is available via the Amazon store in hard copy or for use on Kindle and other devices, and in hard copy only via Lulu.
The book is modelled on an ancient mythology: think of it as a set of folk tales. It explores the world view of the culture from which it originated. However, the story is also in part a satire on human society today. This multi-layered quality is a distinctive feature of the work. It has an author, who has created a narrative allegedly written by ancient scribes. In the book, you will find the Panda tales themselves, as presented by a contemporary narrator, whose own character develops around the stories he presents. And he himself is reliant on a team of researchers on the other side of the world to provide him with new texts to show us. At the heart of it all roams Panda, a naive, socially bewildered seeker after truth, whose journey takes him from innocence through a range of calamities to a finer wisdom. Can we follow him there?
With its surreal humour, lurching plot, and many allusions to popular culture, the book bucks novelistic conventions. It combines an entertaining, often funny surface, with thoughtful probings of the nature of truth, knowledge and experience.
Copyright © Paul Bowers, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2013 and 2018 All Rights Reserved