Travel Miscellany
Personal and Oriental, by Austin Coates (Hut- chinson, 25s.): this has roughly the form of a travel book, but is really a gathering together of twelve years' Asian experience by a man with an extraordinarily chameleon quality that makes him seem not like a Western observer but like an Oriental who happens to know how to explain himself to the West. 'Mentally I faced eastward,' he says, until three years ago he reached the Eastern limit, Japan, and turned round again, physically and spiritually. The book is a record of his journey to Europe from a snowbound Japan, through Hong Kong, the Philippines, Paki- stan, India, and at last Istanbul, picking his in- cidents and people with an eye that seems (in the best sense) that of a novelist; and it combines a luminous understanding of the spirit of what he sees, a strangely anonymous approach to it, with fragments of personal experience and spiritual autobiography, in such a way that the external and the internal vision are matched in significance and strangeness.
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