Peddling
Patrick Skene Catling
Full Tilt: Ireland to India on a Bicycle Dervla Murphy (Century £4.95)
Travel books are revealing works of autobiography, whether the authors in- tend them to be or not. This informal ac- count of a haphazard and hazardous bicycle journey from Lismore, in County Waterford, to Delhi, nearly 5,000 miles in almost six months, reveals a woman of viv- acious curiosity and extraordinary stamina.
The fact that Dervla Murphy is a librarian's daughter may partly explain her romantic desire to go far beyond books and then to make a book of her experiences. She was given her first bicycle and an atlas at the age of ten and secretly resolved to travel by bicycle to India. She was able to realise her ambition when she was 31, in 1963, and her book was published for the first time two years later. It must have seemed fascinatingly, obscurely exotic then; now, in an attractive new edition, it seems poignantly immediate, for the people she respected and loved most on her long journey were the Afghans. Her shrewd and affectionate appraisal of their temperament and traditions helps to explain why the Rus- sians have been having such a hard time trying to subjugate that proud nation.
In Kalat-e-Ghizlot, early in her passage through Afghanistan, having observed, though not having caused, 'the meditative gurgle of the hookahs' and having learnt of the formal ritual of tea-drinking, in a small village inn, she wrote: `By now I'm in love with Afghanistan — with its simplicity, its courtesy and its leisureliness and with the underlying sanity of an area fortunate enough to have remained very backward in- deed . . '
Even after an Afghan accidentally crack- ed three of her ribs with the butt of his rifle (he did so while angrily confronting some- body else), she wrote: 'I feel that Fate has dealt very kindly with me: if I had had to choose a country in which to be delayed I would certainly have chosen Afghanistan . Undoubtedly the Afghans must be, by our standards, the best-looking people in the world.' On another plane of admir- ation, she predicted that Afghanistan's Islamic theocracy would enable the country to resist communism, 'however many Rus- sian helpers and however much Russian money she accepts.'
But this book is no political tract. It is an Intimately subjective, picturesque adven- ture story, with apocalyptic weather, ravenous wolves and clumsy mechanics. Dervla Murphy wrote it brightly, mostly in Plain, colloquial language, which was suitable for a diary that was posted by in- stalments as letters to the friends she left in Ireland. She obviously enjoyed the writing for its own sake, indulging in some lux- uriantly descriptive passages when the land- scapes seemed to deserve them, and contriv- ing the occasional nice, fanciful conceit, such as 'the wind off the desert was like a dragon's breath.'
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