TRAVEL
Disquieted American
Wylie. (Muller, 21s.)
MR. WYLIE went to newly born grandchild I and returned to the United States via Japan, Ind though he sees the through the USIS w windscreen of the con Inland car, Wylie shrewdly finds out a thing or t Westerners should kno he discovers that colou bar, while in Japan he' s I let into the secret that there they still disapprove t of the A-bombing of Hiroshima (in spite of Pearl Harbour). Indians, he finds out, want to stay r out of the Cold War, and to make sure that soon there'll be no flies in India, too. But it was near Be !irut that Wylie got the beat on a real hush-hush story; he discovered (only eight years after!) that there are a million Arab refugees from the Ara Lb-Israeli war of 1948, and that the hostility bet ween the Israelis and the
Arabs means endless local trouble, and may eventually lead to a Third World War. Apart from these revelations Wylie has time to slate his hap- less fellow countrymen when they fall in the tropics. It's neurotic, it's psychosomatic. What are we to make of Wylie, then, who's dosing himself, or is dosed, on and off all through the book with seconal, codeine, streptomycin,' sulfaduxadine and aureomycin? And who even carries around with him 'a supply of Demerol in a rubber-capped, sterile bottle, as well as a hypodermic syringe and the means wherewith to sterilise it.'
A more modest and more effective travel book is Oswell Blakeston's account of his holiday in Finland. He went from Helsinki up to Lapland, and discovered, among other features of the
• Finnish way of life, the delights of the sauna bath, the complexities of the Finnish licensing laws, and the generosity of Finnish hospitality. The scenery, with its great swards of tundra and pines, together with the maze of glaciated lakes which covers almost one-tenth of the country's area, seems par- ticularly attractive. Much Else in Italy is sub- titled 'a subjective travel book' and covers Mr. Boyd's journeyings from Paestum to Assisi and Florence, during which he discourses to a young travelling companion on the history, myths, and religions of the civilisations littered around him. Much of the descriptive writing is well done, and the author's discussion of the similari- ties between pagan classicism and medieval Christianity is written with insight. But, the question-and-pat-answer attitude of the book is unfortunate. 'We pointed out that these were not the same monks who tried Galileo,' is the fatuous comment on one anti-clerical outburst.
DAVID REES
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