Jonathan Raban: Arabia Through the Looking Glass (1979)•
Jonathan Raban (1942-2023)Jonathan Raban: Arabia (1979)
[Hospice Shop, Birkenhead - 24/7/25]:
Jonathan Raban. Arabia Through the Looking Glass. 1979. Picador. London: Pan Books, 1987.
I used to teach a university course in Travel Writing. I wouldn't claim any great expertise in the field, but I have done some travelling from time to time. Who hasn't? However, I've also written about a couple of my trips in two travel books: one about South India, the other about Prague.
You learn by doing. Or so I believe. My Academic colleagues were firmly of the opinion that their wide reading of a variety of travel books qualified them to teach the subject. I don't have any real quarrel with that. Given that my particular area was Creative Writing rather than purely literary studies, though, I felt that only people active in the field can assist students in writing about their own journeys, exterior or interior.
Theory is all very well - and can be interesting at times - but going from your rough journal notes to a intriguing and readable piece requires quite a bit of practical experience of how to write.
"How do you get to Carnegie Hall?"
"Practice, man, practice," as the old gag has it.
LIke so many of us, Jonathan Raban, too, started out as an Academic. You can see from the bibliography below that he tried just about everything except travel writing before going on that first journey to Arabia.
Not that he didn't moonlight in a lot of different areas. He wrote several plays for radio and TV (as well as live theatre) in the 1970s. And you can see him in the picture above assisting American poet Robert Lowell with the revisions to the latter's grab-bag collection of loose sonnets, Notebook (1969 / 1970), eventually reissued in three parts as History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin (1973).
Raban's first substantive book, Soft City, a series of essays and personal reflections on urban life, would probably now be labelled as psychogeography:
A key idea is that cities are "soft" in the sense that city dwellers can impart meaning onto them as they create their identities.Here they are, then, Jonathan Raban's six full-length travel books, in order of publication:
... the "soft city" concept [is] a "mythic city, where illusion, dream, aspiration, and nightmare are all fixed into place ... passed through and acted upon by an individual or a collective."
•
Jonathan Raban: Arabia through the Looking Glass (1979)
Arabia Through the Looking Glass. 1979. Picador. London: Pan Books, 1987.
Into Jonathan Raban's familiar Earls Court neighbourhood after the 1970s oil boom came new visitors from the Arab world, dressed in floor-length robes and yashmaks. A people apart, little known, Raban wanted to get behind the myth and the rumour to discover the reality of their lives and world. His journey took him through Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Yemen, Egypt and Jordan. What he discovered was a far cry from the camel, tent and sand dune archetypes of early European explorers. Oil wealth had seeped into almost every corner, and Bedouin encampments had been replaced by cosmopolitan boomtowns, camels by Range Rovers. The sons of Bedouin nomads were now studying medicine in Europe and engineering in New York. Yet in this fast-moving world, old certainties remained - and cultural innovation lagged miles behind economic change.It's a strange, meandering trip from airport to airport around the Arabian peninsula. Raban probably spends more time drinking with louche ex-pats than he does talking with the "sons of Bedouin", but then a lot of the point of the book comes in deflating the mythic Arabia of Lawrence, Philby and Thesiger.
His travel persona, too, is starting to take shape. There's a cold detachment under the gregarious exterior of the 'Jonathan Raban" on display in his books: he seems to be participating in the lives of the people he encounters, but in reality they're all exhibits in his museum of representative types.
45 years after it was first written, the portraits his book paints of Qatar, the UAE and Yemen are no longer news. It remains surprisingly readable, though: his first essay in the art of travel literature as social and ethical allegory.
Wikipedia characterises Old Glory as follows:
It is in this book that the author develops his own unique writing style (starting to emerge in Arabia Through the Looking Glass), with highly descriptive scenes of the landscape that he passes through, as well as ironic but highly incisive descriptions of the characters he meets along the way. This style is more fully developed in his later travelogues: Coasting, Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America and Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings.It's true that this attempt to retrace Huck Finn's journey down the Mississippi does seem a bit crude compared with the subtlety and complexity of some of his later works - the title, Old Glory, is borrowed (perhaps as a tribute?) from his friend Robert Lowell, who died in 1977 - and there are moments where the travelogue does seem a little over-determined. It's still an impressive and intensely revealing work, though: his first try at what Henry James called "the international theme": the relations between the Old World of Europe and the New World of America.
Coasting is the first work in which all the various strands of Raban's life and writing seem to fuse together in harmony: there's the horror of Thatcher's Britain to contemplate, a visit to his old friend Philip Larkin in Hull, followed by a rather more hostile encounter with rival travel writer Paul Theroux in Brighton.
Most of all, it's a chance to come to terms with his own upbringing as the son of a rural vicar. He said of this conflict within him later, in 2003:
I grew up with a sentimentalised version of the English past, of the enshrined holiness of the squire in the grand house and the tenant farmer and the exact place you occupied. I got ticked off by my father in my early teens if I was seen wandering down the street with a girl from the local secondary modern whom I had met at a church hop. You know: "Not your class, old boy" ... I have to say, however, that it was easy to leave England in 1990. I hated England under Thatcher, although in a funny way I shouldn't have. I mean, she was as antagonistic to the old system of England as I was.
Jonathan Raban: Hunting Mister Heartbreak (1990)
Hunting Mister Heartbreak. 1990. London: Picador, 1991.
Raban accomplishes his own transfer to American soil in the footsteps of Hector St. John de Crèvecœur [= "Mister Heartbreak"], the author of Letters from an American Farmer (1782).
Our hero tries out life in New York City, then Alabama in the deep South, then Seattle in the Pacific Northwest. He finishes off in a boat sailing around the Florida Keys.
His journeys, by this stage, have become almost as schematic as a sociology textbook - they make up a complex patchwork designed as much to answer questions about his own identity as the nature of the places he's exploring. Which is certainly one answer to the inbuilt obsolescence which plagues the travel genre as a whole.
Bad Land was the first of Raban's books I actually read. It impressed me so much that I sampled the following lines from it for a sequence of original and "borrowed" poems based on the concept of personal landscapes:
BadlandsMy God he writes well! There were sections of this long epic account of failed hopes and dreams in the Great American Desert which are not so much poetic prose as pure poetry in themselves.
[After Jonathan Raban]
Aged 47
he chucked up everything
& just cleared off
Lacking a past of his own
he hoped to find
a history that would fit
A dead woodpecker
on the floor
mud-igloos on the walls
•
The letters B L M
– Bureau of Land Management –
are recorded several times
On page 3 of the ledger
a ringed figure shows up
like a Homeric epithet
How do you turn
2.54 debit
into five thousand, six hundred & eighty-eight dollars ninety?
•
To lay a floor like that
was the work
of a true believer
These houses
prairie schooners
lonely derelicts
awash in grass
a nest
for the neighbourhood birds
(22/4-16/7/10)
Interestingly enough, Raban, too, must have been just about exactly 47 when he himself abandoned England in favour of the United States. And (as it turned out) his dreams proved almost as fragile as those of the lost inhabitant of that abandoned sod hut.
Jonathan Raban: Passage to Juneau (1999)
Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings. 1999. London: Picador, 2000.
I didn't really think it was possible for Raban to better the hardbitten epic momentousness of Bad Land. And yet, all things considered, I think that it's Passage to Juneau that I'd see as his masterpiece.
Perhaps it's the honesty with which he chronicles the gradual dissolution of his marriage, destroyed partly by the obsessive nature of his quest to sail from Seattle to Vancouver through some of the most treacherous waters on the globe, which transforms it from just another travel book to a genuine work of literature.
He finds a kind of alter ego in Captain George Vancouver, whose journal of his 1792-94 voyage of discovery through these hitherto uncharted waters - a nightmare of frustration and self-doubt - is Raban's constant companion in the long dangerous nights on board his rather dangerous small boat.
You could, if you wished, see it as the Odyssey to Bad Land's Iliad: a dispassionate chronicle of material so powerful and moving that it transcends our prosaic everyday language. And yet Raban's book is never pompous or overblown. He writes as simply as he can about things which were, by their very nature, never going to be simple.
About this book:When it comes to English travel writing in the early to mid-twentieth century, all one can say is that there was a great deal of it. A few general tendencies can perhaps be picked out from this immense morass of titles.
It comprises all that the author wishes to preserve of the four travel books he wrote between 1929 and 1935: Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days, and Waugh in Abyssinia. “These four books,” he writes, “here in fragments reprinted, were the record of certain journeys, chosen for no better reason than I needed money at the time of their completion; they were pedestrian, day-to-day accounts of things seen and people met, interspersed with commonplace information and some rather callow comments. In cutting them to their present shape, I have sought to leave a purely personal narrative in the hope there still lingers round it some traces of vernal scent … I never aspired to be a great traveller, I was simply a young man, typical of my age; we travelled as a matter of course. I rejoice that I went when the going was good.”
For a start, it was almost de rigueur then for creative writers in genres such as fiction or poetry to add at least one travel book to their list of titles. W. H. Auden, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh - they all travelled, and they all wrote about it, and the results include some of their liveliest and most interesting works. Here are just a few of them:
As well as this, there's a counter-tradition of gussied-up expedition reports. I've made some notes on this in my previous post on Eric Shipton, Frank Smythe, H. W. Tilman, and other writers on Everest and other mountaineering adventures.
This continued into the post-war period in the writings of such visionary (or deluded - depending on your point of view) explorers as Thor Heyerdahl and Tim Severin.
These contrasting trends overlap somewhat in such writers as Robert Byron and Peter Fleming. Some amusing comments on the differences between the two types of traveller can be found at the end of Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958), where the two hapless protagonists run into hardbitten desert veteran Wilfred Thesiger:
'England's going to pot,' said Thesiger, as Hugh and I lay smoking the interpreter's King Size cigarettes, the first for a fornight. 'Look at this shirt, I've only had it three years, now it's splitting. Same with tailors; Gull and Croke made me a pair of whipcord trousers to go the Atlas Mountains. Sixteen guineas - wore a hole in them in a fortnight. Bought half a dozen shotguns to give to my headmen, well-known make, absolute rubbish.'The 1950s were certainly a very coming-down-to-earth kind of decade. The Movement poets resolutely avoided any kind of grandiose verbiage, while the new theatre of John Osborne and Harold Pinter cut the snobbery of the ancien régime of class snobbery down to size.
He began to tell me about his Arabs.
'I give them powder for worms and that sort of thing.' I asked him about surgery. 'I take off fingers and there's a lot of surgery to be done; they're frightened of their own doctors because they're not clean.'
'Do you do it? Cutting off fingers?'
'Hundreds of them.' he said dreamily, for it was very late. 'Lord, yes. Why, the other day I took out an eye. I enjoyed that.'
'Let's turn in,' he said.
The ground was like iron with sharp rocks sticking up out of it. We started to blow up our air-beds. 'God, you must be a couple of pansies,' said Thesiger.
Newby, one of these - if not angry, certainly disillusioned by the war and all that came after it - young men, takes great pleasure in parodying Thesiger's T. E. Lawrence-style "hard man with a classical education" pretensions:
We had been on the march for a month ... there was no more sugar to put in the tea, no more jam, no more cigarettes and I was reading The Hound of the Baskervilles for the third time ...Once Thesiger, "a great, long-striding crag of a man, with an outcrop for a nose and bushy eyebrows, forty-five years old and as hard as nails" comes into sight, however, all is transformed:
All that evening he was opening and shutting boxes so that I had tantalizing glimpses of the contents of an explorer's luggage - a telescope, a string vest, the Charterhouse of Parma, Du Côté de Chez Swann, some fish-hooks and the 1/1,000,000 map of Afghanistan
Perhaps the ultimate blow to these gung-ho attitudes came with the transformation of well-respected travel writer James Morris into their alter-ego Jan Morris.
Morris, who'd been on the 1953 Everest expedition, and already had a string of publications to their name, proceeded to slip into this new identity with grace and aplomb. Nor did the public for either set of books appear to care what name they appeared under.
The world of travel writing - the English-speaking part of it, at any rate - had begun its quiet revolution.
It's hard to date just when this came about, or what, exactly, prompted it, but all of a sudden how you wrote about a place seemed to matter more than where that place was. Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia (1977) is often credited with setting off this transformation, but proponents of Paul Theroux would probably prefer to date it from The Great Railway Bazaar.
Jonathan Raban, too, was a part of this sea-change in British travel writing. It was hard to believe that most of the conversations he recorded had actually taken place - though Chatwin remains unrivalled in the sheer bravado with which he would simply make things up to improve his story - but the style and distinction of his writing left older contemporaries such as Newby in the dust.
Travel writing has always been a broad church, with a plethora of authors adapted to every taste and price-range. From the 1970s onwards, though, it threatened to become literature: not just an accompaniment to the "real" books poets and novelists wrote in their official capacity.
And so it has remained. An unruly, trackless jungle of titles and styles to all appearance, but as much a mirror of the world we live in than any other field of contemporary writing.
Authors:
- Bill Bryson (1951- )
- Robert Byron (1905-1941)
- Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989)
- William Dalrymple (1965- )
- Rowena Farre (1921-1979)
- Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011)
- Peter Fleming (1907-1971)
- Jan Morris (1926- )
- Eric Newby (1919-2006)
- Charles Nicholl (1904-1991)
- Jonathan Raban (1942-2023)
- Tim Severin (1940- )
- Paul Theroux (1941- )
- Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003)
- Secondary & Miscellaneous
Books I own are marked in bold:
'I first encountered Bill Bryson's work in the late 1980s, in an issue of Granta magazine entitled (somewhat misleadingly) Home. Granta was then, unquestionably, the leading periodical for travel writing in the UK. Other writers in the same issue included Jonathan Raban, Norman Lewis and Gavin Young – not to mention such legendary figures as Martha Gellhorn and Václav Havel.
The piece in question was called “Fat Girls in Des Moines” ... The only real difference between it and the first chapter of his maiden travel book The Lost Continent (1989) was that cheeky title, and a large number of rather terrifying photos of crewcut Iowans ploughing fields, eating cotton candy, and generally making beasts of themselves.
On closer examination, most of these photographs turned out to be labelled as stock images from Magnum and other photographic agencies. The decision to include them was therefore (presumably) down to the editor rather than the author, who certainly made no attempt to add any similar illustrations to his own gently satirical account of his lengthy journey around the United States.
I laughed like a drain when I first read the piece, and I’ve laughed every time I’ve read it since. It’s true that some of Bryson’s later works show a certain sense of strain in maintaining this tone of constant facetiousness about everything he sees, everywhere he goes, but his first attempt still seems to me a piece of pure gold.
But then it would, wouldn’t it? I mean, there I was, a New Zealander in the UK, reading a British magazine with some cheap shots about one of the flattest and most boring states in America. There was, in other words, nothing at issue for me in the article.
Bryson had been living in the UK for a long time when he wrote the book – which is in fact an account of precisely that experience of returning somewhere you once knew only too well, but which has now become unfamiliar through the passage of time – and he’d picked up many of the ways of the inhabitants: a self-deprecatory attitude and a sarcastic, razor-sharp tongue among them.
The British, by and large, took to Bryson as they’d taken to few travel writers before him. His fellow-American Paul Theroux was widely read there, but hardly beloved. Bruce Chatwin had always been a bit too strange to be readily assimilated into the literary mainstream. There was something very comforting about Bryson’s writing, though, especially as he began to rack up titles about various other parts of the world with almost equal ease and drollery.
Not so (it would appear) in America. Readers on both coasts may well have enjoyed him (and the books certainly sold well in the country as a whole), but in Iowa, in particular, he was seen as the closest thing to a traitor the red states had produced since Copperhead politician Clement Vallandigham during the Civil War (he was actually from Ohio, but you get the idea).
A whole series of apologies from Bryson has not been enough to correct this impression. He even went to the length of composing a rather saccharine memoir of his idyllic childhood in Iowa, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, to try to restore the balance. Unfortunately, though, The Lost Continent remains a stubborn bestseller, continuously in print since it first appeared at the end of the 1980s, and continues to offend every American without a sense of humour (which seems to include a good deal of the population of the United States) who picks it up!
It’s easy to be philosophical about these things from a distance. New Zealanders, too, can be extremely prickly about “attacks” on their country from outsiders and insiders alike. Paul Theroux’s rather negative comments about us in The Happy Isles of Oceania were headline news when his book first appeared in 1992. And John Cleese’s strictures on Palmerston North led to the local rubbish dump being named after him!
There is something a little provocative about Bryson’s approach to the subject of his home-town, in particular:Outside town there is a big sign that says WELCOME TO DES MOINES. THIS IS WHAT DEATH IS LIKE. There isn’t really. I just made that up. But the place does get a grip on you. (BR 126)“There isn’t really. I just made that up” – a curious admission for the opening of a book of travel sketches. What else has he made up?'
- Jack Ross, Stage 3 Travel Writing Study Guide (2014)
Bibliography
-
Travel:
- The Palace under the Alps and Over 200 Other Unusual, Unspoiled and Infrequently Visited Spots in 16 European Countries (1985)
- The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989)
- The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America. 1989. An Abacus Book. London: Little, Brown and Company (UK), 1997.
- Included in: The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America & Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe. 1989 & 1991. London: Secker & Warburg, 2003.
- Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe (1992)
- Included in: The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America & Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe. 1989 & 1991. London: Secker & Warburg, 2003.
- Notes from a Small Island (1995)
- Included in: The Complete Notes: Notes from a Small Island & Notes from a Big Country. 1995 & 1998. London: Doubleday, 2000.
- A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail (1997)
- A Walk in the Woods. Illustrated by David Cook. London: Doubleday, 1997.
- Notes from a Big Country [aka "I'm a Stranger Here Myself"] (1999)
- Included in: The Complete Notes: Notes from a Small Island & Notes from a Big Country. 1995 & 1998. London: Doubleday, 2000.
- Down Under [aka "In a Sunburned Country"] (2000)
- Down Under. Illustrations by Neil Gower. 2000. A Black Swan Book. London: Transworld Publishers, 2001.
- Bill Bryson's African Diary (2002)
- The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island (2015)
- The Road from Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island. Illustrations by Neil Gower. Doubleday. London: Transworld Publishers, 2015.
- The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words [aka "Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words," 2002] (1984)
- Mother Tongue: The English Language [aka "The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way"] (1990)
- The Penguin Dictionary for Writers and Editors [aka "Bryson's Dictionary: for Writers and Editors," 2009] (1991)
- Made in America [aka "Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States"] (1994)
- Made in America. Illustrated by Bruce McCall. London: Secker & Warburg, 1994.
- A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)
- A Short History of Nearly Everything. 2003. A Black Swan Book. London: Transworld Publishers, 2004.
- A Short History of Nearly Everything - Illustrated. 2003. London: Transworld Publishers, 2005.
- The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: Travels Through My Childhood (2006)
- The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: Travels through My Childhood. 2006. London: Black Swan, 2007.
- Shakespeare: The World as Stage (2007)
- At Home: A Short History of Private Life (2010)
- One Summer: America, 1927 (2013)
- One Summer: America 1927. Illustrations by Neil Gower. Doubleday. London: Transworld Publishers, 2013.
- The Body: A Guide for Occupants (2019)
- The Secret History of Christmas (2022)
Non-fiction:
Evelyn Waugh, who knew Robert Byron at Oxford and suspected him (probably falsely) of communist sympathies, described him, after his death at sea in 1941, as "a dangerous lunatic better off dead." Nancy Mitford, who hoped at one stage that Byron would propose marriage to her, was later "astonished as well as shocked to discover his homosexual tastes." He was, however, lauded by Byzantine historian John Julius Norwich as "one of the first and most brilliant of twentieth-century philhellenes."
According to Wikipedia:Byron travelled in 1925 across Europe in a car to Greece, with Alfred Duggan and Gavin Henderson. It led to his first book, and a second was commissioned for Duckworth by Thomas Balston, to be on Mount Athos. He later visited India, the Soviet Union, and Tibet.In the end, it was the more academic approach to Byzantine studies pioneered by Steven Runciman which would leave the more lasting mark, but there's no doubt that Robert Byron's enthusiastic explorations in the 1920s and 1930s helped dissipate the half-truths and clichés which had, since the time of Gibbon, stood in the way of a more open and appreciative assessment of Byzantine art and history.
It was in Persia and Afghanistan that Byron found the subject to match his style of travel writing. He completed his account of The Road to Oxiana in Beijing, his temporary home. His innovation, that set him apart from his major travel writing rival Peter Fleming and others, was to disregard the conventional continuous narrative.
Bibliography
-
Travel:
- Europe in the Looking-Glass: Reflections of a Motor Drive from Grimsby to Athens (1926)
- The Station (1928)
- The Station. Athos: Treasures and Men. 1928. Introduction by Christopher Sykes. A Phoenix Press Paperback. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2000.
- First Russia, Then Tibet (1933)
- The Road to Oxiana (1937)
- The Road to Oxiana. 1937. Introduction by Bruce Chatwin. London: Picador, 1981.
- Imperial Pilgrimage. "London in Your Pocket" Series (1937)
- The Byzantine Achievement (1929)
- Birth of Western Painting: A History of Colour, Form, and Iconography (1930)
- An Essay on India (1931)
- The Appreciation of Architecture. Adelphi Quartos series (1932)
- Letters Home. Ed. Lucy Butler (1991)
Non-fiction:
Letters:
'If you were looking for books by British writer Bruce Chatwin in a shop, chances are you'd find them in the non-fiction shelves. And, yes, three of the six books he published in his lifetime were about his own travels. The other three were novels. The question is: how reliable is the information included in any of them?
After the first appearance of In Patagonia, the book that made him famous, a number of the people he’d spoken to in Argentina protested that most of what he’d reported about them was inaccurate. As the Wikipedia article on Chatwin puts it:It was the first time in his career, but not the last, that conversations and characters which Chatwin presented as fact were alleged to have been fictionalized.This didn’t seem to affect the popularity of his books, however. In fact, Chatwin and other contemporaries such as Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux were seen at the time (the 1980s and 1990s) as the heralds of a new wave of travel writing – which was felt to be a somewhat moribund genre. These writers, and others who published in the popular British magazine Granta, pioneered a type of very personal, very crafted travel writing, as carefully composed as the fiction most of them were writing at the same time.
If you look at the first page of In Patagonia, you’ll notice at once how carefully Chatwin sets the scene: the short, detail-rich sentences, adding up to a vivid sense of his childhood and schooldays.
It's also interesting that it begins with a strange, ambiguous relic in a “glass-fronted cabinet.” Chatwin began his working life at Sotheby’s, the auctioneers, and in all of his writing a fascination with rich jewels, relics and other objects is apparent. The medieval idea of the “Cabinet of Curiosities” limits – or focuses – his view of the world around him, both as a fiction-writer and a traveller.
In this case the “object” is a piece of brontosaurus skin. Or is it? Other suggestions for this ambiguous piece of dreck include a piece of a frozen Mammoth, or (finally) a “mylodon, or Giant Sloth”.
Don’t trust what you’re told. That seems to be one of the messages in this first chapter of In Patagonia. And – you have to go there to find out.
The jump-cuts in Chatwin’s books tend to be quite cinematic. In chapter two we’re already in Buenos Aires, with no account of how he raised the funds, the journey out, or any other travel agent details. He sees the city as more European than South American, with Nazi names in the phone directory and an atmosphere of old-fashioned Russia:The Russia of greedy kulaks, corrupt officials, imported groceries and landowners asquint to Europe.Chapter 3 takes us (predictably) into a museum. Or, rather, to a closed museum. “The museum is shut for various reasons.”A Peruvian Indian who had come specially from Lima stood about looking crestfallen. Together we shamed them into letting us in.Notice here how effortlessly Chatwin aligns himself as an outsider to this society. He and the Indian are kin, as they wait outside in the cold, “shaming” the authorities into letting them in.
Inside, of course, he is in his element: with one ornate description after another designed not just to help you see the exhibits in this fascinating collection, but to make you feel his enthusiasm. We hear no more about the Peruvian Indian, who has served his turn.
Each one of these chapters is, in itself, a little jewel, loaded with careful colouring and choice of ingredients. It’s obvious – now – why Chatwin burst on the literary scene like a kind of meteor, foretelling a renaissance in exotic travel writing. And yet, there’s something a little superior and judgemental about his writing at times. Take the first paragraph of chapter 3, for instance, with its strong condemnation of the cult of “machismo” [Latin American masculinity]:a thin woman with a black eye and a sickly teenage girl clinging to her dress. Sitting opposite was a boy with green squiggles on his shirt. I looked again and saw the squiggles were knife blades.These people in Chatwin’s train compartment are used as symbols rather than characters: they have no individuality beyond illustrating feminine suffering and male aggression. In Patagonia is, in many ways, a masterpiece. But this tendency to objectify and summarise people rather than trying to get to know them was to recur later in Chatwin’s writing career in an increasingly irritating and perfunctory way.
The travel writer who pretends to be an instant expert on a place he or she knows only superficially is one of the least attractive specimens of the tribe.'
- Jack Ross, Stage 3 Travel Writing Study Guide (2014)
Bibliography
-
Travel:
- In Patagonia (1977)
- In Patagonia. 1977. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1979.
- In Patagonia. 1977. Vintage Classics. London: Vintage, 1998.
- [with Paul Theroux] Patagonia Revisited (1985)
- Patagonia Revisited. Illustrated by Kyffin Williams. Wilton, Salisbury: Michael Russell (Publishing ) Ltd., 1985.
- The Songlines (1987)
- The Songlines. 1987. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1988.
- What Am I Doing Here (1989)
- What am I Doing Here. 1989. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1990.
- Photographs and Notebooks (1993)
- Photographs and Notebooks. Ed. David King & Francis Wyndham. Introduction by Francis Wyndham. Jonathan Cape. London: Random House, 1993.
- Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings 1969-1989 [aka "Anatomy of Restlessness: Uncollected Writings", 1997] (1995)
- Anatomy of Restlessness: Uncollected Writings. Ed. Jan Borm & Matthew Graves. Jonathan Cape. London: Random House, 1996.
- Anatomy of Restlessness: Uncollected Writings. Ed. Jan Borm & Matthew Graves. Picador. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1997.
- Winding Paths: Photographs by Bruce Chatwin. Introduction by Roberto Calasso (1998)
- The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980)
- The Viceroy of Ouidah. 1980. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1983.
- On the Black Hill (1982)
- On the Black Hill. 1982. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1984.
- Utz (1988)
- Utz. 1988. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1989.
- Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin (2012)
- Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin. Ed. Elizabeth Chatwin & Nicholas Shakespeare. 2010. Vintage. London: The Random House Group Limited, 2011.
- Shakespeare, Nicholas. Bruce Chatwin. 1999. Vintage. London: The Random House Group Limited / The Harvill Press, 2000.
Fiction:
Letters:
Secondary:
William Dalrymple began as a distinctly erudite journalist and travel-writer, exploring India, Central Asia, and the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean in a series of early travelogues.
Since then, however, he's evolved into an even more erudite historian of the British Raj and the Moghul Empire in India, culminating in a book, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, which argues for a complete reassessment for the role of Indian religion and culture in the Ancient World.
Should he still be referred to as a travel-writer, in fact? I notice that he's now called an historian on the "William Dalrymple disambiguation page" on Wikipedia.
It's interesting, in this respect, to contrast him with his older contemporary Peter Hopkirk, who started out as a journalist and historian and ended up, in his final book The Quest for Kim: in Search of Kipling's Great Game (1996), as a travel-writer!
Dalrymple has a formidable intellect, and is a passionate advocate for Indian culture old and new. I've read most of his books and am contentedly working my way through the rest of them. My favourite of all (so far) is his brilliantly insightful account of the disastrous British invasion of Aghanistan in 1839, Return of a King.
Bibliography
-
Travel:
- In Xanadu (1989)
- In Xanadu: A Quest. 1989. Flamingo. London: HarperCollins, 1990.
- City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi (1994)
- City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi. Illustrations by Olivia Fraser. 1993. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2004.
- From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (1997)
- From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium. 1997. Flamingo. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998.
- The Age of Kali (1998)
- The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters. 1998. Melbourne: Lonely Planet Publications, 2000.
- Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (2009)
- Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2009.
- The Writer’s Eye (2016)
- White Mughals (2002)
- White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India. 2002. Flamingo. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003.
- The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857 (2006)
- The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty. 2006. London: Penguin, 2007.
- Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan (2012)
- Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan. 2012. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2013.
- [with Anita Anand] Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World's Most Infamous Diamond (2017)
- [with Anita Anand] Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World's Most Infamous Diamond. 2016. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017.
- The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (2019)
- The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2019.
- The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (2024)
- The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2024.
- Lonely Planet Sacred India (1999)
- Begums, Thugs & White Mughals: The Journals of Fanny Parkes (2002)
- Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi 1707–1857 (2012)
- Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company (2020)
History:
Edited:
I suppose, like many others, I fell under the charm of Seal Morning at an early age. Poet Elizabeth Bishop shared this predilection. I've recently been rereading her correspondence with Robert Lowell, Words in Air (2008), and have noted the number of times he assures her that he's about to read the book, on her recommendation (so far as I can tell, he never did.)
It's all a pack of lies, of course. It's doubtful she ever lived in a croft with her aunt, let alone had a singing seal as a pet. But it's hard to care. The story is such a delightful one that most readers, then and now, have simply willed it to be true.
I'm perhaps unusual in having enjoyed as much - or more - her follow-up book, A Time from the World. Being such a devoted fan of George Borrow's books, I find her own account of Romany life almost equally enthralling.
I haven't read her final book, The Beckoning Land, which describes "her spiritual pilgrimage in Ceylon and India." I'd certainly buy it if I saw it, though. She writes in a clear and unpretentious way about subjects of permanent interest: ecology, kindness to animals, and the attraction of the wandering life.
Bibliography
- Seal Morning (1957)
- Seal Morning. Decorations by Raymond Sheppard. 1957. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1957.
- A Time from the World [aka "Gypsy Idyll"] (1962)
- A Time from the World. 1962. London: Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 1962.
- The Beckoning Land (1969)
Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor DSO OBE ... was an English writer, scholar, soldier and polyglot. He played a prominent role in the Cretan resistance during the Second World War, and was widely seen as Britain's greatest living travel writer, on the basis of books such as A Time of Gifts (1977). A BBC journalist once termed him "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene".I think the first time I came across his name was while I was reading Ian Fleming's 1954 thriller Live and Let Die. Fermor's book The Traveller's Tree is recommended to James Bond as a source of information about voodoo rituals by M, who says:- Wikipedia: Patrick Leigh Fermor‘It’s by a chap who knows what he’s talking about,’ he said, ‘and don’t forget that he was writing about what was happening in Haiti in 1950. This isn’t medieval black-magic stuff. It’s being practised every day.’
Fermor's name is now surrounded by a kind of romantic haze which obscures the fact that it's quite difficult to define exactly what he's famous for. Is it the wartime abduction of a German general? It can hardly be for his writing. He didn't publish a book till he was middle-aged, and after that there weren't very many of them. He seems to have cast a distinct allure wherever he went, however, witness Lawrence Durrell's account in Bitter Lemons (1957) of a visit to Durrell's villa in Cyprus:After a splendid dinner by the fire he starts singing, songs of Crete, Athens, Macedonia. When I go out to refill the ouzo bottle ... I find the street completely filled with people listening in utter silence and darkness. Everyone seems struck dumb. 'What is it?' I say, catching sight of Frangos. 'Never have I heard of Englishmen singing Greek songs like this!' Their reverent amazement is touching; it is as if they want to embrace Paddy wherever he goes.That's all very well, but this was, after all, in the middle of the (so-called) Cyprus Emergency, a struggle against the persistence of British colonial rule in Cyprus, and the reunification of the island with mainland Greece. During this uprising:At least 14 Cypriots (including a minor) arrested on suspicion of being EOKA members, were tortured then killed by UK forces during detention. Witnesses – both surviving detainees and UK veterans – recall various kinds of torture and inhumane treatment of detainees.In other words, it wasn't quite the minor misunderstanding among friends that Durrell and other British philhellenes liked to portray in their soppier writings. Bitter Lemons was particularly condemned for its two-faced version of events, above all for Durrell's attempts to pretend sympathy to his Greek friends while serving as a British foreign office official.
The myth of the love of the Greeks for the British dies hard, however - their persistence in refusing to return the Elgin marbles being (apparently) seen by the latter as a mere foible. Ill Met by Moonlight - the 1957 film about his wartime exploits - to the contrary, permit me to express some slight scepticism about this alleged desire "to embrace Paddy wherever he goes."
There can be little doubt, however, that he exuded some kind of Byronic charm that entranced his contemporaries, and still propels the production of memoirs and editions of his letters long after his death (at the age of 96).
Bibliography
-
Travel:
- The Traveller's Tree (1950)
- The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands. Illustrated by A. Costa. 1950. A Grey Arrow. London: Arrow Books Ltd., 1961.
- The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1953)
- A Time to Keep Silence. Photographs by Joan Eyres Monsell (1957)
- Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (1958)
- Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (1966)
- A Time of Gifts – On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (1977)
- A Time of Gifts - On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube. Introduction by Jan Morris. 1977. New York Review Books. New York: The New York Review of Books, 2005.
- Between the Woods and the Water – On Foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland: the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (1986)
- Three Letters from the Andes (1991)
- Words of Mercury. Ed. Artemis Cooper (2003)
- The Broken Road – Travels from Bulgaria to Mount Athos. Ed. Artemis Cooper & Colin Thubron (2013)
- Abducting A General – The Kreipe Operation and SOE in Crete (2014)
- In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Ed. Charlotte Mosley (2008)
- Dashing for the Post: the Letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor [aka "Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Life in Letters"]. Ed. Adam Sisman (2017)
- More Dashing: Further Letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Ed. Adam Sisman (2018)
- C. P. Rodocanachi: No Innocent Abroad [aka "Forever Ulysses"] (1938)
- Colette: Julie de Carneilhan and Chance Acquaintances by Colette (1952)
- George Psychoundakis: The Cretan Runner: His Story of the German Occupation (1955)
- The Roots of Heaven, dir. John Huston (1958)
- Cooper, Artemis. Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure (2012)
- Cooper, Artemis. Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure. London: John Murray (Publishers), 2012.
- Payás, Dolores. Drink Time! In the Company of Patrick Leigh Fermor (2014)
- Doundoulakis, Helias. Gabriella Gafni: My Unique Lifetime Association with Patrick Leigh Fermor (2015)
- Fenwick, Simon. Joan: The Remarkable Life of Joan Leigh Fermor (2017)
- O'Sullivan, Michael. Patrick Leigh Fermor: Noble Encounters between Budapest and Transylvania (2018)
Letters:
Translations:
Screenplay:
Secondary:
It must have been tough for Peter Fleming, who'd always been considered the writer in the family, to watch his younger brother Ian eclipse him with a series of what must have seemed, at first, a pretty standard set of spy thrillers.
All through the thirties Fleming put out a series of bestselling travel books: an account of his search for Colonel Fawcett in Brazil, a series of explorations in Central Asia. His wartime service was impressive, too: service in Norway and Burma, pioneering work on the deployment of commando units.
After the war, as Wikpedia has it:Fleming retired to retired to squiredom at Nettlebed, Oxfordshire and was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant for Oxfordshire on 31 July 1970.He became an historian and occasional essayist in the Spectator, all the while watching the meteoric rise of his brother's writing career. How could anyone have guessed that James Bond would become one of the immortals, his name as immediately recognisable as Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, or Tarzan?
He must also have felt a certain irony in the fact that:After the death of his brother Ian in 1964, Fleming served on the board of Glidrose, a company purchased by Ian to hold the literary rights to his writing, particularly the James Bond novels and short stories.Nevertheless, he remains one of the most influential travel writers of the 1930s. Perhaps the problem was that he peaked too soon? His books remain amusing and readable - infused though they undoubtedly are with the facile racial prejudice of the time.
He travelled widely in far places;
Wrote, and was widely read.
Soldiered, saw some of danger's faces,
Came home to Nettlebed.
The squire lies here, his journeys ended –
Dust, and a name on a stone –
Content, amid the lands he tended,
To keep this rendezvous alone.
Bibliography
-
Travel:
- Brazilian Adventure (1933)
- Brazilian Adventure. 1933. World Books. London: The Reprint Society Ltd. / Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1940.
- One's Company: A Journey to China in 1933 (1934)
- Included in: Travels in Tartary: One’s Company and News from Tartary. 1934 & 1936. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1948.
- News from Tartary: A Journey from Peking to Kashmir (1936)
- Included in: Travels in Tartary: One’s Company and News from Tartary. 1934 & 1936. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1948.
- A Forgotten Journey [aka "To Peking: A Forgotten Journey from Moscow to Manchuria," 2009] (1952)
- Invasion 1940 [aka "Operation Sea Lion"] (1957)
- The Siege at Peking (1959)
- Bayonets to Lhasa (1961)
- The Fate of Admiral Kolchak (1963)
- [as "Strix"] My Aunt's Rhinoceros: And Other Reflections (1956)
- With the Guards to Mexico: And Other Excursions (1957).
- The Gower Street Poltergeist (1958)
- [as "Strix"] Goodbye to the Bombay Bowler (1961)
- André Migot: Tibetan Marches ["Caravane vers Bouddha'] (1955)
- The Flying Visit. Illustrated by David Low (1940)
- A Story to Tell; and other Tales (1942)
- The Sixth Column. A Singular Tale of Our Times (1951)
- [with Derek Verschoyle] Spectator's Gallery: Essays, Sketches, Short Stories & Poems from The Spectator (1932)
- Variety: Essays, Sketches and Stories. Illustrated by Roger Pettiward (1933)
History:
Essay collections:
Translation:
Fiction:
Edited:
Catharine Jan Morris ... (born James Humphry Morris ...) was a Welsh historian, author and travel writer. She was known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy (1968–1978), a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, including Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong and New York City. She published under her birth name, James, until 1972, when she had gender reassignment surgery after transitioning from male to female.
Morris was a member of the 1953 British Mount Everest expedition, which made the first ever confirmed ascent of the mountain. She was the only journalist to accompany the expedition, climbing with the team to a camp at 22,000 feet, and using a prearranged code to send news of the successful ascent, which was announced in The Times on the day of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation (2 June 1953).- Wikipedia: Jan Morris
I still remember with some amusement the reaction of my uncle, a great admirer of the Pax Britannica books, to the news that one of his favourite authors had suddenly decided that he was a girl. You could see the two ideas warring in his head: on the one hand, a sound commentator on the glories of empire; on the other, some New Age poofter sunverting the natural order of things. It did not compute.
I think it did him good in the long run, though, because I was amazed how welcoming he and his family were to the lesbian mothers of two children sired by his youngest son as a favour to the couple. Children and mothers were all treated as family with minimum fuss at Christmas and other festivals. I can't imagine my own parents being as unembarrassedly accommodating.
There's a certain smugness to some of Morris's writing, especially latterly, but there can be no doubt that she was a most consummately professional travel writer. If it was there to be seen, she would see it - then sum it up in mellifluous prose.
Bibliography
-
Travel:
- Coast to Coast [aka "As I Saw the USA"] (1956)
- Sultan in Oman (1957)
- The Market of Seleukia (1957)
- The Market of Seleukia. London: Faber, 1957.
- Coronation Everest (1958)
- South African Winter (1958)
- The Hashemite Kings (1959)
- Venice (1960)
- The Road to Huddersfield: A Journey to Five Continents (1963)
- Cities (1963)
- The Presence of Spain (1964)
- Spain (1964)
- Oxford (1965)
- The Great Port: A Passage through New York (1969)
- Places (1972)
- Travels (1976)
- Destinations (1980)
- The Venetian Empire (1980)
- A Venetian Bestiary (1982)
- Wales: The First Place (1982)
- The Matter of Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country (1984)
- Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country. [as 'The Matter of Wales', 1984]. Rev. ed. 1998. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000.
- Journeys (1984)
- Among the Cities (1985)
- Among the Cities. 1985. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
- Hong Kong (1988)
- Locations (1992)
- O Canada! (1992)
- Sydney (1992)
- Fifty Years of Europe: An Album [aka "Europe – An Intimate Journey"] (1997)
- Fifty Years of Europe: An Album. London: Viking, 1997.
- Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2001)
- A Writer's World: Travels 1950–2000 (2003)
- Contact! A Book of Glimpses (2009)
- Contact! A Book of Encounters (2010)
- The Outriders: A Liberal View of Britain (1963)
- The World Bank: A Prospect (1963)
- The Pax Britannica Trilogy:
- Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress (1973)
- Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress. Pax Britannica, 1. 1973. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
- Pax Britannica: The Climax of Empire (1968)
- Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire. Pax Britannica, 2. 1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
- Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (1978)
- Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat. Pax Britannica, 3. 1978. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
- Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress (1973)
- The Spectacle of Empire: Style, Effect and the Pax Britannica (1982)
- Stones of Empire: Buildings of the Raj. Photographs by Simon Winchester (1983)
- Manhattan '45 (1987)
- Over Europe: Post-War Photographs (1991)
- Battleship Yamato: Of War, Beauty and Irony (2018)
- Fisher's Face (1995)
- Lincoln: A Foreigner's Quest (2001)
- Ciao, Carpaccio! (2014)
- Conundrum (1974)
- Conundrum. 1974. London: Faber, 2002.
- Pleasures of a Tangled Life (1989)
- "Herstory" (1999)
- A Writer's House in Wales (2002)
- In My Mind's Eye: A Thought Diary (2018)
- Thinking Again (2020)
- Allegorizings (2021)
- The Upstairs Donkey, and Other Stolen Stories (1961)
- Last Letters from Hav (1985)
- Hav: Last Letters from Hav & Hav of the Myrmidons (2006)
- Our First Leader: A Welsh Fable (2000)
- The Bedside Guardian 11: A Selection from the Guardian 1961-1962 (1962)
- The Oxford Book of Oxford (1978)
- The Oxford Book of Oxford. 1978. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
- John Ruskin: The Stones of Venice (1989)
History:
Biography:
Memoirs:
Fiction:
Edited:
Eric Newby ... was an English travel writer. His works include A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, The Last Grain Race and A Small Place in Italy.
Newby was born in Barnes, London, and grew up near Hammersmith Bridge ... His father, George, was a partner in a firm of wholesale dressmakers, and his mother, (Minnie) Hilda (née Pomeroy) had been a dress model at Harrods. Newby was educated at St Paul's School; after leaving school he worked for two years at the Dorland advertising agency until 1938 when, at the age of 18, he apprenticed aboard the Finnish windjammer Moshulu and took part in the "grain race" from Australia to Europe by way of Cape Horn. This voyage was subsequently described in The Last Grain Race and pictorially documented in Learning the Ropes.- Wikipedia: Eric Newby
Escape is certainly the dominant theme in Newby's writing. Sometimes he's escaping from the Germans (as in Love and War in the Apennines), sometimes from the boredom of life in the rag trade (A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush), but he's always got something - whether simply boring or actively unpleasant - to run away from.
The result can be very amusing or a little irritating, depending on your point of view. Personally, I tend towards the former view, though his tendency to guy everyone he meets can being to pall after a time. Mostly his books are pretty good value, I think.
Bibliography
-
Travel:
- The Last Grain Race (1956)
- A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958)
- A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. 1958. Picador Travel Classics, 17. Foreword by Evelyn Waugh. London: Picador, 1997.
- Slowly Down the Ganges (1966)
- Grain Race: Pictures of Life before the Mast in a Windjammer (1968)
- [with Diana Petry] Wonders of Britain: A Personal Choice of 480 (1968)
- [with Diana Petry] Wonders of Ireland: A Personal Choice of 484 (1969)
- Great Ascents: A Narrative History of Mountaineering (1977)
- The Big Red Train Ride (1978)
- On the Shores of the Mediterranean (1984)
- Round Ireland in Low Gear (1987)
- What the Traveller Saw (1989)
- A Small Place in Italy (1994)
- A Merry Dance Around the World: The Best of Eric Newby (1995)
- Learning the Ropes: An Apprentice in the Last of the Windjammers (1999)
- Departures and Arrivals (1999)
- A Book of Lands and Peoples (2003)
- Something Wholesale: My Life and Times in the Rag Trade (1962)
- Love and War in the Apennines [aka "When the Snow Comes, They Will Take You Away"] (1971)
- Love and War in the Apennines. 1971. London: Picador, 1983.
- A Traveller's Life (1982)
- A Traveller’s Life. 1982. London: Picador, 1983.
- Time off in Southern Italy: The Observer Guide to Resorts and Hotels (1966)
- My Favorite Stories of Travel (1967)
- The Mitchell Beazley World Atlas of Exploration (1975)
- A Book of Travellers' Tales (1985)
Autobiography:
Edited:
Charles Nicholl is an English author specializing in works of history, biography, literary detection, and travel. He has been active as a writer since the 1970s and has been publishing books since 1980. His subjects have included Christopher Marlowe, Arthur Rimbaud, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Nashe and William Shakespeare.
... Nicholl was educated at King's College, Cambridge. In 1972, early in his career, he won the Daily Telegraph's "Young Writer Award", which gave him tickets to the Caribbean, as a result of which he visited Colombia. Since his early work he has shown an interest in counterculture. In 1974 he was the winner of the Sunday Times "Young Writer Award" for his account of an LSD "trip" (psychological reaction to a hallucinogen) entitled 'The Ups and The Downs'. He has since written about such topics as the drug trade (for example in The Fruit Palace) and the Elizabethan underworld (for example in The Reckoning).- Wikipedia: Charles Nicholl
I like the way they put "trip" in inverted commas, then explain what it means in druggie parlance. It all sounds a bit like the warning signs of "Reefer madness" in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
The fact remains that Nicholl is a brilliantly original and thematically adventurous writer. His accounts of such past events as Rimbaud's life in Africa - or of Christopher Marlowe's refusal to pay the bill in the tavern he was drinking in at the time - are as exciting as any of his present-day trips (in the other sense).
One could, I suppose, query whether the term "travel writer" is a really a useful one when describing his work to date, but he certainly started out that way, and he still - we're told - continues to lecture to a variety of audiences, including (apparently) those on "Martin Randall Travel tours."
Bibliography
-
Travel:
- The Fruit Palace (1985)
- Borderlines: A Journey in Thailand and Burma (1988)
- The Creature in the Map: A Journey to El Dorado (1995)
- The Creature in the Map: A Journey to El Dorado. Jonathan Cape. London: Random House, 1995.
- Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa (1998)
- Somebody Else: Rimbaud in Africa, 1880-91. 1997. Vintage. London: Random House UK Ltd., 1998.
- Traces Remain: Essays and Explorations (2011)
- The Chemical Theatre (1980)
- A Cup of News: A Biography of Thomas Nashe (1984)
- The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (1992)
- The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe. 1992. Picador. London: Pan Books Limited, 1993.
- Screaming in the Castle: Selected Shorter Pieces (2000)
- Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind (2004)
- Leonardo da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind. 2004. London: Penguin, 2005.
- Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (2005)
- The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (2007)
- Christopher Marlowe: The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1993)
Biography:
Edited:
I suppose that my first acquaintance with the name "Jonathan Raban" came as a direct result of my mad passion for the work of American poet Robert Lowell.
Who was this Raban that his name should be embossed in such large letters on the cover of a mere selection from the master's poetry to date? Not that it's a particularly useful book. Lowell insisted on rewriting - and cutting to the bone - many of his most famous poems before he would allow Raban to include them. Later he had a change of heart, as you can see in his own final comprehensive selection from his life's work, but by then it was too late for this particular take. It's become the chronicle of a particular moment in the poet's development rather than his achievement first to last.
It was, of course, after this that Raban became a name in his own right. Arabia Through the Looking Glass appeared some three years later, and Old Glory, his account of a voyage down the Mississippi, began his world-wide success.
That is, after all, the trouble with travel writing: its inbuilt obsolescence. No matter how carefully you study and portray the places you go to, they will, in the nature of things, have changed considerably by the time your book reaches print. If you try to reread it a few years later, any information it contains about local conditions or mores will be so obsolete that its significance has become almost entirely historical: an account of how a place was (or might have been perceived) at a particular moment.
Which is probably why the most successful and lasting works of travel literature are the ones with some more complex axe to grind. It's an unpretentious way of examining the larger truths of human existence - and you don't have to be a philosopher to have your ways of thinking challenged and enlarged by travel: travel anywhere ... around your room, across the harbour, to the other side of the world. It doesn't really matter where, as long as it sets off some creative engagement with external phenomena.
I'm not sure that Jonathan Raban's six travel books will live. Will they still be of anything more than antiquarian interest in another fifty years? I am sure that they deserve to, though. Raban's lifelong search for a lasting identity: the "great, good place" of Henry James, is one which will resound with anyone moved by similar desires - which is probably all of us.
Bibliography
-
Travel books:
- Arabia Through the Looking Glass (1979)
- Arabia Through the Looking Glass. 1979. Picador. London: Pan Books, 1987.
- Old Glory: An American Voyage (1981)
- Old Glory: An American Voyage. London: Collins, 1981.
- Coasting (1986)
- Coasting. 1986. Picador. London: Pan Books, 1987.
- Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America (1990)
- Hunting Mister Heartbreak. 1990. London: Picador, 1991.
- Bad Land: An American Romance (1996)
- Bad Land: An American Romance. 1996. London: Picador, 1997.
- Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings (1999)
- Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings. 1999. London: Picador, 2000.
- Foreign Land (1985)
- Waxwings (2003)
- Waxwings. Picador. London: Pan Macmillan Ltd., 2003.
- Surveillance (2006)
- The Technique of Modern Fiction: Essays in Practical Criticism (1968)
- Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn (1968)
- The Society of the Poem (1971)
- Soft City (1974)
- For Love & Money: A Writing Life, 1968-1987 (1989)
- For Love & Money: Writing / Reading / Travelling, 1968-1987. 1987. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1988.
- God, Man and Mrs Thatcher: A Critique of Mrs Thatcher's Address to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (1989)
- My Holy War: Dispatches From the Home Front (2006)
- Driving Home: An American Journey (2011)
- Father and Son (2023)
- Square [teleplay] (1971)
- A Game of Tombola [BBC Radio] (1972)
- Centre Play: Water Baby [BBC Radio] (1975)
- At the Gate [BBC Radio] (1975)
- The Anomaly [BBC Radio] (1975)
- Snooker [teleplay] (1975)
- Square Touch [Old Vic Theatre, Bristol] (1977)
- Will You Accept the Call? [BBC Radio] (1977)
- The Sunset Touch (1977)
- Robert Lowell’s Poems: A Selection (1973)
- Robert Lowell’s Poems: A Selection. 1973. London: Faber, 1974.
- The Oxford Book of the Sea (1992)
Novels:
Essays:
Plays:
Edited:
It's not as if Tim Severin invented the idea of building some kind of mythical craft and sailing it somewhere to prove that - however improbable it might seem - its original voyages might actually once have taken place. Thor Heyerdahl got there long before him with Kon-Tiki, Ra, and various other craft.
Severin certainly plugged the concept with a vengeance, though. The Brendan Voyage, in particular, was a gripping piece of writing - and actually made some very interesting points about the early Atlantic voyages of Irish monks. They were, after all, already in Iceland when the Norsemen arrived, so they must have got there somehow.
Whether his reconstructions of the possible routes taken by Sindbad, Ulysses and Jason were equally compelling is a matter of opinion. I'm not sure that they added a great deal to the world's thought, but they were certainly in the grand tradition of travel adventure.
He lived, it would appear, a long and full life, and fans (like myself) of his increasingly absurd and fanciful journeys will certainly miss him.
Bibliography
-
Travel:
- Tracking Marco Polo (1964)
- The Brendan Voyage (1978)
- The Brendan Voyage. 1978. London: Arrow Books, 1979.
- The Sindbad Voyage (1982)
- The Sindbad Voyage. 1982. Century Travellers. London: Arrow, 1991.
- The Jason Voyage: The Quest for the Golden Fleece (1985)
- The Jason Voyage: The Quest for the Golden Fleece. Drawings by Tróndur Patursson. Photographs by John Egan, Seth Mortimer and Tom Skudra. Hutchinson. London: Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1985.
- The Ulysses Voyage (1987)
- The Ulysses Voyage: Sea Search for the Odyssey. Drawings by Will Stoney. Photographs by Kevin Fleming, with Nazem Choufeh and Rick Williams. Hutchinson. London: Century Hutchinson Ltd., 1987.
- Crusader (1989)
- In Search of Genghis Khan (1991)
- The China Voyage (1994)
- The Spice Islands Voyage (1997)
- In Search of Moby-Dick (1999)
- Seeking Robinson Crusoe (aka "In Search of Robinson Crusoe"] (2002)
- Explorers of the Mississippi (1968)
- The Golden Antilles (1970)
- The African Adventure (1973)
- Vanishing Primitive Man (1973)
- Adventurers and Explorers (1973)
- The Oriental Adventure: Explorers of the East (1976)
- The Man Who Won Siberia (2014)
- Viking Series:
- Odinn's Child (2005)
- Sworn Brother (2005)
- King's Man (2005)
- Saxon Series:
- The Book of Dreams (2012)
- The Emperor's Elephant (2013)
- The Pope's Assassin (2015)
- The Adventures of Hector Lynch:
- Corsair (2007)
- Buccaneer (2008)
- Sea Robber (2009)
- Privateer (2014)
- Freebooter (2017)
History:
Fiction:
'American-born Paul Theroux is extremely versatile as a writer, having published numerous novels, collections of short stories and travel books. His first really big success, though, came with the book The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) which records a trip across Asia conducted (pun intended) entirely by train.
There’s an interesting passage in its sequel, The Old Patagonian Express, where he tries to repeat the experiment by travelling by train from Boston to the extreme tip of South America, which seems to me to encapsulate his travel persona.
Like any dutiful travel writer, Theroux tries to engage the other people in his compartment on the commuter train out of Boston in conversation. One of them remarks that the snow outside is “like the Trans-Siberian”:‘No, it’s not,’ I said.You don’t say! You mean he actually didn’t want to speak to you anymore after you’d rudely contradicted him, then made a snappy comeback designed to impress him with your expert knowledge of Siberia? It’s the strange naïveté with which Theroux chronicles this exchange which really impresses me. It’s as if he genuinely doesn’t know the basic rules of social intercourse with strangers.
He winced and went on staring. I walked back to the end of the car, but felt bad for having snapped at him. I looked back and saw him still there, studying the darkness. He was elderly and what he had said to me was a friendly gesture. I pretended to look out the window myself, and when he stretched and came towards me … I said, ‘Actually, there isn’t this much snow in Siberia.’
“You don’t say.’ He kept moving. I could tell from his gruffness that I had lost him.
Not content with this faux pas, Theroux now moves on to the other passengers in the train and encounters a young woman who harangues him on the subject of Zen Buddhism and vegetarianism instead of asking him any questions about himself:At the time, I did not think Wendy was crazy in any important sense. But afterwards, when I remembered our conversation, she seemed to me profoundly loony. And profoundly incurious. I had casually mentioned to her that I had been to Upper Burma and Africa … I had shown a knowledge of Buddhism and the eating habits of Bushmen in the Kalahari and Gandhi’s early married life. I was a fairly interesting person, was I not? But not once in the entire conversation had she asked me a single question. She never asked what I did, where I had come from, or where I was going. When it was not interrogation on my part, it was monologue on hers.I love that phrase “I had casually mentioned …” I can just imagine Theroux “casually” mentioning yet another reason why he’s the most interesting and charismatic person she’s likely to run into in a month of Sundays. Poor fool, she fails to notice. What other possible explanation could there be than that she’s “loony”?… she was an example of total self-absorption and desperate self-advertisement. She had mistaken egotism for Buddhism. I still have a great affection for the candour of American college students, but she reminded me of how many I have known who were unteachable.I suppose that if you happened to run into Josef Stalin on an evening train ride, he might merit this amount of castigation for his “egotism” and “self-absorption,” but it does seem a little disproportionate for a talkative young American college student!
At this stage, I’m afraid, it’s tempting to read over the writer’s shoulder a certain chagrin by a middle-aged man at not being regarded as anything particularly out of the ordinary by a pretty young woman: “I was a fairly interesting person, was I not?” Apparently not, Paul – not to Wendy, at any rate.
It would be easy enough to multiply examples of this technique of retrospective character-assassination: what one might call the traveller-as-curmudgeon-abroad – one wonderful instance being the young South African couple whom Theroux deliberately misdirects in his walk around the coast of Great Britain in The Kingdom by the Sea (as revenge on them for daring to have been born in a bastion of white supremacy, it seems). It’s not, perhaps, that he’s really so much nastier than the next man. Just that he seems to be unaware of how transparent his motivations are to other people.
The point of this long preamble, though, is to explain just why I see his extremely negative views of the Pacific as pretty much par for the course. His 1992 book The Happy Islands of Oceania does, admittedly, show him at his lowest personal ebb, with his marriage in ruins, and his planned trip by canoe around the Pacific designed as a kind of personal therapy. This may account for the harshness of his account of – for instance – “Na Zillun”, full of “dusky islanders ... from Fatland”:Plenty of them are as nice as pie, people said, but lots of them are rapists. Everyone had an opinion about them: You should see the thighs on some of them, people said. You should see their tattoos. Your Maori just doesn’t want to work, they said ... Your Tongan is a decent chap, but your Samoan can be a terror when he’s the worse for drink.
The two character sketches he includes of our (then) Governor General, Dame Cath Tizard, and our former Prime Minister David Lange really show the novelist at work, though. They might as well be wearing a black hat and a white hat to identify them as, respectively, a baddy and a goody:She seemed in the end rather silly and shallow and unimaginative, as well as bossy, vain and cunning, but principled in a smug and meddling way. A New Zealander to her fingertips, worthy of the Queen’s Honour’s List. In a silence after the meal she hitched up her skirt and suddenly spoke up:The choice of words here is positively Dickensian: that detail about her “hitching up her skirt” is particularly telling. Along with some earlier comments about her table manners: “Her finger was in her mouth, fishing for bits of trapped lamb sinews”, those were the things that really caused offence when this book finally arrived in the hands of New Zealanders.
“I once called a man a fuckwit,” she said in her governor-general’s voice, dredging up one of her political victories. “Of course I didn’t apologize. He was a fuckwit.”
What, then, of David Lange? Judge for yourself:I liked his frankness, and I found him funny. Lange was on familiar terms with the entire world and with its events. He had spent his entire working life making the acquaintance of powerful people. …Now this preference of Theroux’s for Lange over Tizard could of course be attributed to the natural solidarity of two men in the midst of marriage break-ups. They were (at the time) in virtually the same boat, and Theroux therefore goes out of his way to defend him later when a passing Australian describes our ex-PM as “fucked-up and far from home.”
Any conversational lull was my cue for asking a question, and he always gave me a straight answer, and this included questions about the breakup of his marriage and his relationship with his speech writer, Miss Pope …I said, ‘I have the feeling he’s going to be fine.’There may be a bit more to it than that, though. Compare the following passages:[Tizard:] “Did you say you’re a writer? What sorts of books do you write?”Can the difference in his accounts of the pair simply come down to the fact that one of them had heard of him and the other hadn’t? Are writers actually that vain? It was, I believe, Mark Twain who remarked that the best way to any writer’s heart was to tell them that you’d read one of their books. And if you really want them to like you, he added, tell them you’ve read all of their books.
“All sorts,” I said, but already she seemed bored.
[Lange:] I told him my name.
“Really? The writer? and he named some of my books. “Are you writing something here?”
“No, just paddling.”
David Lange was certainly a very witty and charismatic man (I only saw him in action once, at a booklaunch in Auckland, but it was a pretty memorable experience). The way that Theroux savours those delicious details of their meeting, though: the naming of the books (proving that he wasn’t just pretending), the genuine curiosity about what he was writing next, show just how effective a little flattery can be.
I once heard Dame Cath Tizard give a launch speech, too. I couldn’t tell you what she said. I’m sure it was very smooth and accomplished. It was pretty obvious to me that she hadn’t read the book. She seemed out of place, in fact: as if the whole world of print was an alien sphere to her.
I just want to make it clear that I’m not trying to give Paul Theroux a dose of his own medicine. While not exactly a fan, I’m certainly an admirer of his immensely accomplished and varied writings in many genres: from SF to thrillers, Conradian adventure stories to travel books. For myself, I find this petty vanity of his rather endearing – it humanises him, and adds greatly to the interest of the various self-portraits in his many non-fiction texts.'
- Jack Ross, Stage 3 Travel Writing Study Guide (2014)
Bibliography
-
Travel books:
- The Great Railway Bazaar (1975)
- The Great Railway Bazaar. 1975. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
- The Old Patagonian Express (1979)
- The Old Patagonian Express. 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
- The Kingdom by the Sea (1983)
- The Kingdom by the Sea. 1983. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
- Sailing Through China (1984)
- Riding the Iron Rooster (1988)
- The Happy Isles of Oceania (1992)
- The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific. 1992. New York: Ballantine Books, 1993.
- The Pillars of Hercules (1995)
- Dark Star Safari (2002)
- Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008)
- The Last Train to Zona Verde (2013)
- Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads (2015)
- On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey (2019)
- Sunrise with Seamonsters (1985)
- The Imperial Way. Photographs by Steve McCurry (1985)
- [with Bruce Chatwin] Patagonia Revisited (1985)
- To the Ends of the Earth: The Selected Travels of Paul Theroux (1990)
- Travelling The World: The Illustrated Travels of Paul Theroux (1990)
- Fresh Air Fiend: Travel Writings (2000)
- The Tao of Travel (2011)
- Figures in a Landscape: People and Places (2018)
- Waldo (1967)
- Fong and the Indians (1968)
- Girls at Play (1969)
- Murder in Mount Holly (1969)
- Included in: The Collected Short Novels. 1998. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
- Jungle Lovers (1971)
- Saint Jack (1973)
- The Black House (1974)
- The Black House. 1974. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
- The Family Arsenal (1976)
- The Family Arsenal. 1976. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
- Picture Palace (1978)
- The Mosquito Coast (1981)
- The Mosquito Coast. 1981. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
- Doctor Slaughter (1984)
- Doctor Slaughter. 1984. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
- Included in: The Collected Short Novels. 1998. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
- O-Zone (1986)
- My Secret History (1989)
- Chicago Loop (1990)
- Dr. DeMarr (1990)
- Included in: The Collected Short Novels. 1998. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
- Millroy the Magician (1993)
- The Greenest Island (1995)
- My Other Life (1996)
- Kowloon Tong (1997)
- The Collected Short Novels (1998)
- The Collected Short Novels: Murder in Mount Holly; The Greenest Island; Doctor Slaughter; Dr DeMarr; Bottom Feeders; The Rat Room. 1969, 1980, 1984, 1990, 1996, 1998. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
- Hotel Honolulu (2001)
- Nurse Wolf and Dr. Sacks (2001)
- Blinding Light (2006)
- A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta (2009)
- The Lower River (2012)
- Mother Land (2017)
- Under the Wave at Waimea (2021)
- The Bad Angel Brothers (2022)
- Burma Sahib (2024)
- Sinning with Annie and other stories (1972)
- Included in: The Collected Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997.
- The Consul's File (1977)
- The Consul’s File. 1977. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
- Included in: The Collected Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997.
- World's End and Other Stories (1980)
- Included in: The Collected Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997.
- The London Embassy (1982)
- Included in: The Collected Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997.
- The Collected Stories (1997)
- The Collected Stories: Sinning with Annie; World’s End; The Consul’s File; The London Embassy. 1969, 1980, 1977, 1982 & 1997. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997.
- The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro and Other Stories (2004)
- The Elephanta Suite (2007)
- Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories (2014)
- The Vanishing Point: Stories (2025)
- V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to his Work (1972)
- A Christmas Card. Illustrations by John Lawrence (1978)
- London Snow. Illustrations by John Lawrence (1980)
- Sir Vidia's Shadow (1998)
Travel collections:
Novels:
Short stories:
Miscellaneous:
I've quoted above from the rather amusing passage in Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush where he and his companion finally encounter the legendary desert traveller Wilfred Thesiger, "also known as Mubarak bin Landan (Arabic: مُبَارَك بِن لَنْدَن, the blessed one of London."
After dismissing them as a "couple of pansies" for bringing an airbed with them, the great man goes to sleep on the cold bare floorboards of the hut they're in.
It's impossible to doubt the courage and persistence with which Thesiger pursued his goals: crossing of the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula, and living with the Marsh Arabs of Iraq. It's hard, though, to avoid the feeling that this was the last moment when such "desert-mad Englishman" attitudes could possibly have been taken seriously.
He was born in Addis Ababa, the son of the British consul-general in Ethiopia. Wilfred and his younger brother were the only European children for most of his early years there. That gave him a strong taste for the dramatic and colourful life he saw around him, and it was this that fuelled his travels and writings for the rest of his life.
He was, nevertheless, a scout for the oil companies at various times - as well as an agent of British imperialism. These may have seemed less directly in contradiction to his ownecological and conservationist concerns at the time, but it seems harder to find a way to reconcile all these warring attitudes now.
Bibliography
-
Travel:
- A Journey Through the Tihama, the 'Asir, and the Hijaz Mountains (1948)
- Arabian Sands (1959)
- Arabian Sands. 1959. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.
- The Marsh Arabs (1964)
- The Last Nomad (1979)
- Visions of a Nomad (1987)
- Desert, Marsh & Mountain (1995)
- Desert, Marsh and Mountain: The World of a Nomad. London: Collins, 1979.
- The Danakil Diary: Journeys through Abyssinia, 1930–34 (1996)
- Among the Mountains: Travels Through Asia (1998)
- A Vanished World (2001)
- The Life of My Choice (1987)
- My Kenya Days (1994)
- My Life and Travels (2002)
- Asher, Michael. Thesiger (1994)
- Maitland, Alexander. Thesiger: A Life in Pictures (2004)
- Maitland, Alexander. Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer (2006)
Autobiography:
Secondary:
Fyodor Andreevich Bronnikov: Horace reading to Maecenas (1863)coelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt
– Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Epistles 1: 11, l.27
[“those who cross the sea change skies, but not their souls”]
Travel broadens the mind. Or does it? Some would say that travel can have the opposite effect: narrowing the mind, confirming one’s prejudices and presuppositions about other places and people.
What matters most, perhaps, is how you travel.
If you don’t know who you are already, the mere fact of going elsewhere is unlikely to tell you. And there are some exceptionally crass – air-conditioned and hermetically-sealed – ways to travel.
Travel is fun, but it’s also arduous – even dangerous sometimes. Sitting in a sunlit tropical bar sampling daiquiris may seem like the acme of happiness on a grim midwinter day at home with the rain pelting down, but it palls very quickly. Nor is it particularly interesting to read about.
So travel writing may seem like a pretty amorphous, come-one, come-all genre, but its practitioners still have to face that basic task of conveying something fascinating about where you happen to be sitting to readers who may not ever be there themselves.
My own definition of the term “travel” is pretty liberal. It doesn’t have to be overseas, out of town, or even – in extreme cases – outside the house to be a successful travel piece, in my opinion. The French writer Xavier de Maistre even wrote a very successful book called Voyage autour de ma chambre [A Voyage around My Room] in 1794, while under house-arrest in Italy for duelling.
Travel writing (for me, at any rate), is writing which is directed outwards: outside the self. Writing, in other words, which is interested in a larger world than the essentially interior and personal approach of Life Writing (biography or autobiography).
That’s not to say that a clear view (and studied projection) of the self is not important in Travel Writing. It is. It’s just that the persona of the travel writer is a means to an end, not the end in itself. We may like or dislike our guides through the regions we visit: what’s important is that they engage us, that we end up listening to what they have to say.
And, like any good guide, sometimes what they say to us is not so much the strict truth as it is the kind of thing that should be true, or is almost true but not quite. A certain amount of creative licence – extending at the very least to rearranging events to fit into a more compelling pattern, at worst to complete fiction – is also in the nature of the genre as it’s evolved over the past couple of centuries.
The Wikipedia article on the subject emphasises its range of styles as well as sources:from the documentary, to the literary, as well as the journalistic, and from memoir to the humorous to the serious ... Travel writing may be found on web sites, in periodicals, on blogs and in books. It has been produced by a variety of writers, including travelers, military officers, missionaries, explorers, scientists, pilgrims, social and physical scientists, educators, and migrants.They also mention the fact the lack of respect it tends to attract:Travelogues are a special kind of texts that sometimes are disregarded in the literary world. They weave together aspects of memoir, non-fiction, and occasionally even fiction to produce a story that is equally about the trip and the goal.Here are a few more books I myself found useful when putting together my own course on the subject:
Bibliography
- Berchet, Jean-Claude, ed. Le Voyage en Orient: Anthologie des voyageurs français dans le Levant aux XIXe siècle. 1985. Bouquins. Ed. Guy Schoeller. Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, S.A., 1989.
- Brent, Peter. Far Arabia: Explorers of the Myth. 1977. London: Quartet, 1979.
- Buisseret, David, ed. The Oxford Companion to World Exploration. Published in Assocation with the Newberry Library. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
- Day, David. Antarctica: A Biography. A Knopf Book. Sydney: Random House Australia Pty Ltd, 2012.
- Drabble, Margaret. A Writer's Britain: Landscape in Literature. Photographed by Jorge Lewinski. 1979. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1987.
- Fussell, Paul, ed. The Norton Book of Travel. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987.
- Granta 20 (Winter 1986) – In Trouble Again: A Special Issue of Travel Writing. Ed. Bill Buford. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
- Granta 23 (Spring 1988) – Home. Ed. Bill Buford. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988.
- Hakluyt, Richard. The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English nation made by Sea or Overland to the Remote & Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at any time within the compasse of these 1600 Yeares. Introduction by John Masefield. 1907. 8 vols. Everyman’s Library. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1926.
- Hanbury-Tenison, Robin, ed. The Oxford Book of Exploration. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
- Hopkirk, Peter. Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling's Great Game. Illustrations by Janina Slater. London: John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., 1996.
- Hulme, Peter & Tim Youngs, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. 2002. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
- Kemp, P. K. ed. A Hundred Years of Sea Stories: From Melville to Hemingway. London: Cassell & Company, Ltd., 1955.
- Kennedy, Ludovic, ed. A Book of Sea-Journeys: An Anthology. 1981. London: Fontana/Collins, 1982.
- Kirwan, L. P. A History of Polar Exploration. 1959. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962.
- Learmonth, Eleanor, & Jenny Tabakoff. No Mercy: True Stories of Disaster, Survival and Brutality. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2013.
- Leslie, Edward E. Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls: True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors. 1988. London: Macmillan, n.d. [c.1989].
- Lockhart, J. G. Mysteries of the Sea: A Book of Strange Tales. The Nautilus Library, 1. 1924. London: Philip Allan & Co., 1937.
- Manley, Deborah, ed. The Nile: A Traveller's Anthology. London: Cassell, 1991.
- Penguin 60s: Travel. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996:
- Blixen, Karen (Isak Dinesen). From the Ngong Hills [from Out of Africa (1937)].
- Fermor, Patrick Leigh. Loose as the Wind [from A Time of Gifts (1977)].
- Frater, Alexander. Where the Dawn Comes Up Like Thunder [from Beyond the Blue Horizon (1986)].
- Hepburn, Katherine. Little Me [from Me (1991)].
- Morris, Jan. Scenes from Havian Life [from Last Letters from Hav (1985)].
- Shand, Mark. Elephant Tales [from Travels on My Elephant (1991)].
- Theroux, Paul. Slow Trains to Simla [from The Great Railway Bazaar (1975)].
- Thubron, Colin. Samarkand [from The Lost Heart of Asia (1994)].
- Tully, Mark. Beyond Purdah [from The Heart of India (1995)].
- Young, Gavin. Something of Samoa [from Slow Boats Home (1985)].
- Spufford, Francis. I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination. London: Faber, 1996.
- Thompson, Carl. Travel Writing. London & New York: Routledge, 2011.
•
- category - Travel & Exploration: Travel
•
No comments:
Post a Comment