Treading safely into the unknown
Philip Glazebrook
ON FOOT TO THE GOLDEN HORN: A WALK TO ISTANBUL by Jason Goodwin Chatto, £15.99, pp. 278 journey, especially a trudge through Eastern Europe like Jason Goodwin's, needs a sense of purpose to keep the show on the road quite as much as it needs a physical objective. I mean that it should appear to the reader to be an investigation of certain interesting questions always pre- sent in the traveller's mind and so always serving as a focus for his experiences and his thoughts. Isolated incidents and stray encounters need to be interrelated in a nar- rative which hooks the reader's interest by linking physical progress with the progress of the investigation. William Dalrymple's In Xanadu was a clever example of this tight integration of theme and journey. Mr Goodwin's book, though it contains many an interesting page, and a good many remarks which show insight and intelli- gence — 'Shopping is perhaps the quickest and most painless way to explore a city' is really more of a ramble than a purpose- ful walk, a little too discursive and frag- mented to hold the reader's attention.
Want of focus is the fault which weakens the book. Matters which loom large for a walker — the state of his feet, the weight of his pack — are of very slight concern to the reader, whose patience with complaints on this score is soon exhausted. Then, however vulnerable he may feel in a Polish forest, the traveller must take care not to appear timorous, for he should remember that the reader is safe in his armchair, from which all but the most serious dangers may be laughed at as chimeras. Mr Goodwin is afraid of gypsies, truck drivers, of solitary walkers and groups of walkers, of shep- herds and of a dog; when he describes him- self and his friend as being 'attacked' by
A
this dog, which really only came and barked at them, the armchair traveller will shuffle his feet impatiently and hope for worse to follow. But the worst that befalls this pair is that the young lady gets a fly in her coffee.
Now, we would sympathise with Kate and her fly if her portrait had been more vividly painted. The gnat has its place in the story, so long as it's the one that broke the camel's back. If more had been made of the characters of the three walkers, and of their relationship with one another, such details as the dog and the fly might have contributed to an integrated picture. As Mr Goodwin acknowledges, perhaps wistfully, when he says that 'Each lonely action seems in a way divine', the traveller gives up a great deal by not travelling alone loses the clarity of an T for the blurred focus of 'we' — so that he must in compen- sation milk the 'human interest' angle as a novelist would, by exploiting the foibles and frictions of his companions. At the hint of a squabble, the reader pricks up his ears; but Mr Goodwin is too discreet, for he always closes the door in our faces before the row gets under way. What he lets fall about Kate adds up to the smudged snap in a passport. This, in her case, may be discre- tion, but in the case of their companion for half the journey, Mark, I began to wonder how observant of his friends Mr Goodwin is, for he appears surprised and mortified when this Mark behaves quite in character by tramping off on his own.
Few graphic pictures, either of people or of places, were put into my mind by Mr Goodwin's writing, and once again it is want of focus which is the defect. Instead of picking one simile to convey an idea, he uses three: 'They were positively bellowing, like children at the end of class; or people coming out of a library; or an awkward party after a glass is broken'. This is bird- shot in place of the bullet, confusion instead of clarity. It's the writer's business to decide whether Transylvania is best described as 'like a horseshoe' or as 'a little like a flying poop': the choice is unhelpful, and defeats the purpose of simile.
Poop or horseshoe, Transylvania is what is memorable in the book, its best and longest section, the only part of the journey which made me wish I was on foot like the author amongst those curious Saxon towns. In Transylvania Mr Goodwin gets nearer to the elation and joie de vivre which was else- where absent from the trip, or at any rate from this account of it. For elation was missing; there was never enough lilt and swing to the expedition to lift the baggage of history and dissertation off the ground. Despite the earlier unquiet wanderers evoked now and then, Wandering Jew or questing knight, Mr Goodwin never quite hitched his wagon to their star, and his long slog afoot never quite made it to the glistering mystical Constantinople of his ambition, but petered out unresolved in the suburbs of Istanbul.
Previous page
