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After the Death of the Masters

Last summer the two masters of travel writing, Norman Lewis and Wilfrid Thesiger, died within a month of each other. As Britain buried the last of her explorers and the best of her travel writers, it became clear that a literary threshold had been crossed. The obituaries were unanimous in their praise of these great men, a pair of triumphant individualists who were born with a zeal to record a vanishing world.

Despite their passionate identification with different cultures and their public championing of endangered societies, they were both also self-effacingly modest. Indeed, by the standards of today’s tabloids they might seem indecently reticent. Norman Lewis claimed he could walk into a room full of people and leave it some time afterwards without anyone realizing that he had been there. Wilfrid Thesiger could never claim such invisibility. His beak-like nose, craggy profile and taste for traditional tailoring, whether in Chelsea or Afghanistan, made him instantly recognizable, but his icy reserve kept him insulated from all but a handful of intimates. This self-discipline was not forced in either man. Rather it was an essential component of their role as travel writers. They were there to observe, to record the world dispassionately, not to paint self-portraits or to cast their shadow over the landscapes they loved.

This is not to suggest that travel writing should be considered a brood-sister to a scholarly work of anthropology. Although you may learn more about the nature of Neapolitan life from Lewis’s masterpiece Naples ’44 and more about the realities of Bedouin existence from Thesiger’s marvellous Arabian Sands than you would if you read a dozen academic textbooks, the reader should always be cautious. Thesiger travelled with youthful outcasts of Omani society whilst Lewis spent much of his time in Naples with prostitutes. Travel writing is always at its best when it is an individual’s passionate response to a society. It seldom, if ever, aspires to a balanced viewpoint and is most famously effective when a whole culture is threatened with destruction. The writer can then pull out all the stops and in

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Last summer the two masters of travel writing, Norman Lewis and Wilfrid Thesiger, died within a month of each other. As Britain buried the last of her explorers and the best of her travel writers, it became clear that a literary threshold had been crossed. The obituaries were unanimous in their praise of these great men, a pair of triumphant individualists who were born with a zeal to record a vanishing world.

Despite their passionate identification with different cultures and their public championing of endangered societies, they were both also self-effacingly modest. Indeed, by the standards of today’s tabloids they might seem indecently reticent. Norman Lewis claimed he could walk into a room full of people and leave it some time afterwards without anyone realizing that he had been there. Wilfrid Thesiger could never claim such invisibility. His beak-like nose, craggy profile and taste for traditional tailoring, whether in Chelsea or Afghanistan, made him instantly recognizable, but his icy reserve kept him insulated from all but a handful of intimates. This self-discipline was not forced in either man. Rather it was an essential component of their role as travel writers. They were there to observe, to record the world dispassionately, not to paint self-portraits or to cast their shadow over the landscapes they loved. This is not to suggest that travel writing should be considered a brood-sister to a scholarly work of anthropology. Although you may learn more about the nature of Neapolitan life from Lewis’s masterpiece Naples ’44 and more about the realities of Bedouin existence from Thesiger’s marvellous Arabian Sands than you would if you read a dozen academic textbooks, the reader should always be cautious. Thesiger travelled with youthful outcasts of Omani society whilst Lewis spent much of his time in Naples with prostitutes. Travel writing is always at its best when it is an individual’s passionate response to a society. It seldom, if ever, aspires to a balanced viewpoint and is most famously effective when a whole culture is threatened with destruction. The writer can then pull out all the stops and indulge in a poignant elegy to a dying world. It is one of the pleasures of a settled, comfortable life to indulge in this melancholy process of regret. It also helps prepare you for old age and death, if you can convince yourself that all the beauty of the world has been destroyed. However, if you have ever been privileged to witness the ecstatic delight of an isolated village at last being linked to the outside world, and given access to hospitals, schools and a market place, you might seriously doubt that anyone could resist such progress. That said, the skilful evocation of a destroyed world can turn a travel book into a historical document. The young Mungo Park, his hat-band stuffed with notes, could never have known that with his diaries he was creating a prime source of West African history. Thesiger would also achieve this with his book on The Marsh Arabs (whose home in the flooded delta-land of Mesopotamia in southern Iraq was drained by Saddam Hussein). In Voices of the Old Sea Norman Lewis wrote one of the iconic books of the twentieth century. It chronicles a self-contained Spanish fishing village with a sophisticated oral culture of verse-making, just before it is destroyed by mass tourism; Lewis is almost completely absent from the narrative. This, I feel, is one of the marks of a true travel writer. The narrator’s interest in ‘otherness’ is wholly absorbing. Looking back at these masters and contemplating the present state of travel writing, one has to acknowledge that we are in a new era. Travel documentaries now record every corner of the world, yet they are a paradox. Travel, by its very nature, cannot easily be framed by a medium which requires, even at its most pared-down, a cameraman, a sound recorder, a director/producer and a narrator working to a script and a budgeted schedule. In practice, as the credits at the end of each programme so honestly reveal, the film crew will be much, much larger. As an experienced travel producer explained to me, one concept every half hour is all their target audience can be expected to absorb. A television audience will also expect an easy flippancy and will not normally tolerate more than ten minutes of filming in the same landscape before boredom sets in. Such is the lucrative effect of the TV tie-in that anything with a whiff of television gets published, marketed and enthusiastically stocked by the bookshop chains. This is the world in which Michael Palin has become the best-known traveller of the day, his books selling by the hundreds of thousands. His recent work, Sahara, has been written in the form of a continuous diary. The reality was a series of country-by-country visits based on filming needs which involved the participants being ferried over for each session. For instance ‘Day Fourteen: Tinfou to Tindouf’ casually implies that Palin crossed the Moroccan Saharan frontier to visit the Polisario camp in Algeria. On a map they look close enough but it is in fact impossible to travel on the ground from one to the other, for this highly sensitive frontier with its unreported border war has been closed for thirty years. I like Palin better when he honestly records heading back to ‘an English summer to cool off until the Saharan summer has burnt itself out’. Travel writing has become an annex of the entertainment industry. Fellow-publishers have confided that sexual tension between travellers is always good for sales whilst a travel writer reticent about personal relationships will not help his book’s ‘profile’. Contemporary travel writers now skip lightly along the tracks first forged by the great explorers, ever conscious that with this trip they might finally ‘break into’ film. To add a sense of achievement modern travel writers will have to invent new ways in which to cross the Sahara or to trudge across the utmost poles, or burden themselves with a half-trained string of camels, an elephant, a fridge, a mule or an unresponsive girlfriend. In any one year you can be reasonably sure that British publishers will be producing a book touching on elephants in India, a horse-ride across Central Asia and a camel trek. By the end I am usually damp-eyed with concern for the animals and correspondingly irritated with the writer without having learned anything of interest about the humans encountered along the way. So has the great British tradition of travel writing been overwhelmed by the combined effects of television and the new mass market? Who are the heirs of the great master travel writers? I called in on the handful of bookshops in London where the staff actively choose their stock. There are not many of these places left, but those that we have, such as Daunt’s, John Sandoe, Heywood Hill and the Metropolitan Bookshop, have become as valuable as whole libraries. The depression soon lifted. Even restricting my survey to the books that had been published in the last couple of years I found myself with an impressive shortlist which I have reluctantly whittled down to five. Looking at their spines, I feel an extraordinary new confidence in the genre. I had already unwittingly met Ghada Karmi, the author of In Search of Fatima, when she spoke at an anti-war rally in Hyde Park, but her calm literary voice is a world removed from the fervent rhetoric of that day. She has also neatly reversed all the usual stereotypes of travel writing, for she is a woman, she is Arab, she comes from a Muslim culture and she is exploring England. Though born in Jerusalem, her childhood was spent with embittered Palestinian exiles in a north London suburb – ironically also one of the chief Jewish neighbourhoods. This was the springboard for her passionate attachment to her adopted land and its tolerance. In Search of Fatima is the story of her love for England which is capped by her fairytale marriage to a liberal gentleman. Disenchantment and political radicalization ultimately follow, but the domestic focus of the first half of this book is a vital aspect of its success. For I believe that it is a conscious and skilful attempt to educate the British into an emotional sympathy with a Palestinian – any Palestinian – and so help break the hostile stereotypes that still dominate the collective imagination. The Zanzibar Chest begins as a classic post-colonial journey of discovery as we follow its young author, Aidan Hartley, in the footsteps of his adventurous Empire-minded antecedents, especially his Odysseus-like father, who served as colonial officer, ranch-owner, agricultural adviser and finally as an aid-worker in his beloved Africa. Each successive decade of the late twentieth century saw such ‘White Africans’ ever more marginalized from the East African power structure. Aidan clearly sees his own career – he is a journalist writing on Africa – as one more step down this ladder away from any enriching involvement with the land. To help understand this remorseless process of exclusion he also investigates the assassination of his father’s best friend, Peter Davey, back in the days of the British-controlled Aden Protectorate. As the revelations of Davey’s secret love affair with a Yemeni woman (and his secret conversion to Islam) are unearthed, so the tempo of Aidan’s own life speeds up. His experience of the last months of the Ethiopian civil war and the implosion of state authority in Somalia, followed by the disastrous US intervention, creates a compelling, nervy and disturbing narrative. A chillingly competitive love affair with a fellow-journalist provides the right emotional setting for a final descent into the killing fields of Rwanda. Hartley has created a book fit to stand beside Conrad, Gide and Ryszard Kapuscinki’s The Shadow of the Sun. It also provides the perfect preparation for Emma’s War by Deborah Scroggins. This is on one level an impeccably researched account of the short but tempestuous life of Emma McCune, an English aidworker who fell in love with Riek Machar, one of the commanders of the southern Sudanese resistance to the Muslim north. It is also a very professional survey, and within the context of this personal tale, Scroggins neatly defines the rival ethnic and linguistic groups that make the Sudanese civil war such a complicated affair, without losing sight of the classic North-South divide. But on another, much richer level this book is a dialogue between two different sorts of relationship with Sudanic Africa. For Atlanta-based Scroggins is also an aid-worker – clearly professional, well-briefed and efficient at her job – whilst Emma often comes across as a frivolous adventure-seeker looking for fulfilment and status in Africa that she could never find in her Yorkshire homeland. On the other hand, Emma was prepared to love Africa, to love individual Africans and to leave the privileged comforts of the aid-workers’ barracks (and their Western-scale salaries) to live in a Sudanic village. While Emma ends up defending a tribal slaughter perpetrated by her husband, her ex-colleagues (there to feed the starving) go on strike when their regular supply of air-freighted meals is suspended. As a debate about the motivations of modern aid-workers the book is totally engrossing. Scroggins also has a journalist’s eye for compelling detail, the kind that haunts the imagination and continually pricks the conscience. If the British may feel ambivalent about their involvement in the Sudan, this is as nothing compared to the French relationship with North Africa. It is a truism of Algeria that the French are too interested, the rest of Europe is uninterested and so no one is disinterested. John Kiser’s The Monks of Tibhirine is a beautiful, uplifting book that is all the more welcome because it breathes a spirit of heroism and courage into the scorched emotional landscape of French Algeria. Like Emma’s War, it is another example of a highly professional work by an American journalist researching the life of a maverick European who dies tragically young in Africa. This recipe again makes for a compelling combination, because both Europeans and Algerians are assessed with equal weight whilst none of the tangled background of two centuries of murderous history is taken for granted. It is also a very particular book, in part because it is about sacrifice, in part because it studies the thought processes, rivalries and secret ambitions of a group of Trappist monks. The story is centred on the character of Christian de Cherge, whose life was saved in the Algerian War of Independence by Mohammed, a young village policeman who stepped in front of this unarmed young French soldier to protect him from resistance fighters. Mohammed insisted that de Cherge was a good man and a friend to Muslims. The freedom fighters let them both go that day but a few days later Mohammed was found with his throat slit. Mohammed’s self-sacrifice inspired the rest of de Cherge’s life. Years later, he would become the dynamic head of a small Trappist monastery, energetically pursuing a religious dialogue with Islamists during the dangerous years of the Algerian civil war. The world needs such stories: of a Frenchman driven to follow the life of Christ to its ultimate conclusion by the self-sacrifice of a Muslim. Although I learned a lot about Algerian politics from John Kiser, The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones is easily the most outwardly political book in this short list. It is a scorching analysis of Berlusconi’s Italy and would be unreadable if one were not convinced that Tobias Jones adores Italy and fully intends to spend the rest of his life there. For only someone who is prepared to enter the political struggle should be allowed to pen such a biting, crushing, but also wickedly entertaining portrait of a nation state. Nor is it just Italian politics and Italy’s corrupt economy that are under review: even the Italians’ football, their faith and the betrayed promise of their glorious cinematic culture are taken apart. Berlusconi is clearly the villain of the piece but Tobias Jones is too analytical not to see that he is a symptom, not the cause, of the country’s troubles. Jones is also refreshingly different in not ascribing all Italy’s problems to the lawless Mafia- and Camorra-ridden south. Instead he examines the prosperous northern cities – Milan and Genoa, with their so-called White Mafia, his beloved Red Padua and the deadly legacy of the unfinished civil war that was fought in the North between the partisans and the fascists. The Dark Heart of Italy will stand as a companion volume beside Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily; another epic in the outside world’s obsessive love-hate relationship with Italy. The genius of a good travel writer is to take the reader by the hand and lead him gently, with wit and skill, into physical and mental landscapes he would never otherwise have encountered. As the world divides yet again into two armed camps, the need for observant travellers remains vital.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 6 © Barnaby Rogerson 2005


About the contributor

Barnaby Rogerson helps run Eland Books with its list of the great works of travel literature. His own most recent book, Heirs of the Prophet, was published in 2006.

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