Imagine a well: a deep, dark, disused hole in the ground, empty except for a few puddles that collect at the bottom and the occasional flies that buzz around down there in curiosity. Enough flies, in fact, to feed a small colony of pale-skinned, big-eyed frogs.

For these creatures at the bottom of the well, they live the froggy equivalent of a good life: enough insects, just enough light to catch them by, no predators. They’re happy. They can see the white disk of daylight way above them, like a light that switches on and off, but they have no concept of the vast and colourful world that exists up there.

Imagine a skylark, flying the heavens above. There is this beautiful panorama that spreads out all around but when he hears the happy croaking from this old disused well he thinks that a poor creature has got stuck down in some hell-hole.

I’ve asked myself ever since - am I frog or a skylark? How ignorant are we of the vastness and wonders that somehow lie beyond us? Is humankind stuck on Earth like some frogs down a well and utterly unaware of the wonders of the universe, except for the odd flash of light from above?

Here’s another question: how can a triangle be a square? Stuck in a two dimensional reality you cannot envisage that some three dimensional form can be both a triangle (looking at it from one side) AND a square (looking from above) – but it’s easy for a pyramid.

If the shadow of a pyramid is a triangle (see photo), what is a pyramid the shadow of? Some higher dimensional reality? Is there a world up there beyond us? Are we frogs just shadows of an existence up there that we cannot envisage?

Of such questions, stories like Frogs, Cats and Pyramids are made. And so, in this book, The Moonlight Cat goes on a voyage of discovery – like us all. What does it mean to live a good life?

I’ll be treating these themes at my book launch in Bogota, Colombia, 6.30pm, Thursday 22 May at Authors Bookstore (Calle 70; No. 5-23). I’ll be giving a photo presentation on my compilation of short stories – Frogs, Cats and Pyramids, and my novel: El Mono.

They are also featured in my blog: http://tonycleaveruk.wordpress.com

El Mono is the novel that I was inspired to write since coming to Colombia in 2011. It too features a journey of self-discovery although it embraces many other themes as well. It starts with an idea that came out my short stories – that in a world of global capitalism, conflicts in the future will take place not between countries but between multinational corporations. What if competition between big businesses actually gets fought out in proxy wars between sponsored groups of paramilitaries?

So I started my novel with that idea…but what I found out in writing this book was, like many authors before me, when you create characters – hopefully believable characters - to move the plot along they develop a dynamic of their own. They actually take over. If you create believable characters struggling with real issues then they have a way of deciding outcomes that surprise you. The relationships that develop between Karin Roth, an exchange student seeking her future in Colombia, her friend Claudia, and the two men Karin meets - el mono, the mountain man, and Morten Fields the chief of a multinational mining company – develop in ways that surprised me. Things happen between them that I did not originally plan. In fact two chapters I wrote in my original design of the plot had to be discarded because they ceased to fit where these characters wanted to go.

The book starts with the experience of Juan Sebastian, a Colombian campesino, who leaves his home in Cauca and ends up in Popayan (a beautiful market town) in order to avoid being press-ganged into the notorious guerrilla outfit, the FARC.

We then meet Karin Roth an exchange student of Anglo German parentage from the University of Durham who comes to Bogota to study at Universidad de los Andes. She goes on holiday with a friend to Popayan where she becomes fascinated by el mono – this man of the mountains who has a mystical, magical connection with the wildlife of the area

Meanwhile, based in the Department of Cauca, two competing multinational corporations are fighting it out (literally) for control of the region’s mining resources. (One of the issues I was anxious to avoid in writing this novel was not to portray Colombia as riddled with ruthless and murderous drug cartels. This country has had enough of such overblown publicity. But I had to find some people, some agencies that represent the evil forces against which are pitted the good guys …so the violence that is portrayed in my novel is inflicted on Colombia by foreign forces…in this case competing multinational corporations.)

So the original idea of multinational corporations fighting it out in my novel is retained…but I became more and more drawn into the personal relations between the protagonists, and their relation with the beauty of the natural environment of Colombia – and in particular the paramo of the Andes (see photo above). There is thus a clash of cultures that runs all the way through this book and which Karin Roth has to struggle with: modern, urban, materialistic lifestyles against traditional, indigenous, rural ways of life that are born of the natural environment in which they are placed.

All countries, and especially those in the developing world, have to plot their own futures in our globalised world - pursuing increasing incomes, and yet finding enough space for the expression of their own culture. Individuals, communities and countries must decide somehow what to knock down, use up and what to build and, in so doing, what to protect, preserve and what part of natural and social heritage to encourage in offsetting the relentless pursuit of material gain. El Mono is a Colombian who personifies that which we stand to lose if we are too short-sighted in our pursuit of consumerism.

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