Travel
Posted April 11, 2009, 08:04 ET
Why do travel books, indeed travel itself, exert such a strong fascination. A natural curiosity about other people is part of it. So too, for those not wholly satisfied with their lives, is the escapist belief that we shall be happier elsewhere if we can leave our present lives behind. Such people are always disappointed, when they arrive in Greeneland, for they always brings themselves with them.
And so I address myself for the first kind of reader or traveller, the person who is simply curious about other people, other places.
What then makes for a successful travel book? Two things–interesting places and an interesting writer. Bruce Chatwin visted interesting places, but his books are now forgotten as he himself was never of great interest, shy, reserved, always seeking to disappear in his travels. And then there is the repellant Ugly Brit or Ugly American, whose smug and ill-informed book tells us: Look how backward they are, compared to us! Peter Mayle, Adam Gopnik. We are progressive, they tell us, worship us!
How different are the travel writers who sympathize with the people they visit, whose lives themselves fascinate. Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, Wilfred Thesiger, Robert Byron.
After being explelled from his public school, Fermor decided to walk across the continent to Constantinople in 1933, with a little kit and a small edition of Horace’s Odes, and 50 years later wrote two wonderful books about this: A Time for Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. He later joined the Irish Guards, and as a special operations officer parachuted into Crete three times, where he captured and kidnapped a German General.
Thesiger (Eton, Magdalen) went native, as only a Brit can do. He was only at home, it seemed, in Arab headdress, amongst his Bedoiun companions. In Ethiopia he had a run-in with Evelyn Waugh. How one should have liked to have seen that!
Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana will likely never go out of print. The books tells of an obsession with Byzantine culture and a visit to pre-war Persia and Afganistan, along with the long-suffering Christopher Sykes. Sykes afterwards wrote about Byron in Four Studies in Loyalty. Byron was a fierce anti-appeaser before the war. He was at a party, wrote Sykes, when he struck a guest who had been mocking Britain. “I always do this when someone abuses my country,” he explained. His plane was shot down in 1941.
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