Marabou Stork Nightmares His life in this state is a miserable affair, surrounded by uncaring doctors and his extremely dysfunctional family. In his fantasy life, he is an adventurer in the wilds of South Africa, where he and his loyal guide, Sandy Jamieson, hunt for the marabou stork. When not hallucinating, Strang tells his life story, beginning in a "scheme" (local authority housing) in Muirhouse, Scotland, with his violent, delusional parents, two half-brothers (one a womanizer, the other flamboyantly gay), and his promiscuous sister, all of whom he despises. The family relocates to apartheid-era South Africa when he is an adolescent, where he
A Kind of Anger his past anger at his business failure and at his unfaithful girlfriend, was now driven by 'a new kind of anger', anger against Lucia's enemies. Towards the end of the book Sanger revises his opinion. He now thinks that what drives Piet isn't new but as old as the hills: he has discovered his vocation as a crook. Following his suicide attempt, instead of prescribing pills and electro-shock treatment, his psychiatrists should just have told him to go rob a bank. The title itself thus adds to the numerous comments throughout the text which help to create the novel's comically