The hair and fingernails of the corpse

Peregrine Hodson

The rot probably set in with Homer. The Odyssey has faults that still plague the genre of travel writing: a threadbare plot of departure, tribulation and return, with a lot of embroidery. Most travel writers have followed in Homer's footsteps and made the same mistakes. Herodotus managed to make things worse by spicing his narrative with temple prostitutes and drug-taking Scythians to keep his ancient Greek read- ers turning the pages, confirming their prejudices that foreigners were a lot of uncivilised barbaroi.

By the Middle Ages the genre was in a sorry state and Sir John Mandeville, describing his travels in foreign parts, strikes a note of desperation with his tales of anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders. Marco Polo went some way to correcting the mythopo- etic tendencies of travel writing with a touch of first person realism, but by making the narrator the main character he weak- ened the genre further. The self-portrait may be hero or clown, but the reader has to look over the travel writer's shoulder to see the foreign country, reduced to a half- imaginary landscape, like the background to a mediaeval picture.

Except for truly inspired egoists like Boswell and Goethe, whose attraction is autobiographical rather than geographical, the Grand Tour brought a further decline in the quality of travel writing. Travellers, schooled in the classics, recorded their impressions of the Continent in the style of (yawn) Pausanias. In Rome at last, with some fake antiquities and a patina of cul- ture, they could ponder how hordes of pre- vious visitors had ruined the place, whether Goths or Vandals, and murmur, sotto voce, like some of their late 20th-century coun- terparts, 'sic transit gloria mundi'.

In the 19th century, when exploration and empire building were almost synony- mous, travel writing deteriorated further into patriotic propaganda. Armchair trav- ellers, reading exponents of the genre such as Park or Burnaby, absorbed the assump- tions of the white man's imperium and the certainties of the Victorian era: progress and civilisation, soap and the Bible. In the spirit of the age, travel writing became an industry: writers stoked the prejudices of their readership and, in the time-honoured tradition of the genre, heathens, savages and foreigners gave the gentle reader a frisson of horrified self-satisfaction.

Once railways were built, aesthetes and literary types hopped on the gravy train to report on mosque architecture in central Asia or the niceties of the Japanese tea ceremony. Although Evelyn Waugh mocked travel writing 50 years ago, he also produced the stuff, and the genre somehow survived mass tourism, satellite pictures and videos, into the Eighties. Now, by com- mon consensus, travel writing is dead.

But like the hair and fingernails on a corpse, travel books keep on appearing. Faced with the problem of marketing a book about a foreign country, publishers and booksellers seem unable to think of any other label apart from 'travel'. It may be better than 'geography', but until they find another sales pitch, books about micro-liting in Mongolia or bicycling in Bophuthatsowana will continue to take up shelf space next to literary non-fiction such as V. S. Naipaul. As a result, a travel writer in the traditional mould like Pico Iyer is in the same category as a tourist writer like Harry Ritchie.

Falling off the Map is a collection of trav- el essays written

to introduce potential visitors to places of potential interest; to serve, that is, as open- eyed first impressions.

The author begins, 'On every trip I took to Havana . . . ', and then elaborates on some lonely places of the world, the sub-title of the book.

Lonely places, according to Pico Iyer, are the places that don't fit in, the exceptions that prove every rule. 'Loneliness cuts in both directions, and there are 101 kinds of solitude' . . . 'all lonely places have some- thing in common, if only the fact that all are marching to the beat of a different satellite drummer'.

Pico Iyer's writing stretches from North Korea through Argentina, Cuba, Iceland and Bhutan to Vietnam, Paraguay and Australia. It is hard to find a common thread running through all these countries, apart from the author's itinerary. Perhaps the loneliness of the long distance travel writer inspired him to write: 'Everywhere, in some lights, is a lonely place, just as everyone, at moments, is a solitary.'

I am singularly unpersuaded. Canned Heat, the Sixties rock group, put it more accurately, if less lyrically, when they sang `We've been round the world and now we know — it's the same the whole world over, 'cause it's people everywhere you go'.

Pico Iyer is intelligent and sensitive with a whimsical humour which might make him a charming travelling companion. He pre- sents himself in a light, sophisticated way: `I felt as if I were walking through the pages of Italian Vogue'. But, by his own description, he doesn't seem to engage with people in a way that reveals the alien and makes it human. Perhaps unreasonably, one hopes for more insight into cultural differences than the information he pro- vides: from the heights of a granite column in Korea, (450 feet), to the depths of the Icelandic winter, (-15 degrees Fahrenheit) and the number of pages in the Bhutan Telephone Directory 1986, Fire Tiger Year, (76). The preoccupation with num- bers is infectious: 'And . . . ' starts a para-

graph 17 times, 'Yet ' 27 times.

Lacking the language in most countries, Pico Iyer does what most tourists do. He wanders the streets, looks into shops and bars and admires natural and man-made scenery. He enjoys the multi-cultural:

The famous discos in Reykjavik have been Berlin, Hollywood, Casablanca and Broad- way; the new places to eat are Asia, Shang- hai, Tokyo and Siam. One of the trendiest joints in town is the L A Cafe ...

He likes international comparisons:

Thailand — like Cancun or the Lake District, or many of the lovely places of the world seems to have mastered the art of selling itself while giving almost nothing of itself away.

The style is mid-Atlantic, Inter-continen- tal, a bit like Alan Whicker:

Iceland is one of the largest islands in the world and, at the same time, one of the smallest worlds in the island. [sic]

Counting dishes on menus (240 at Maxim's in Saigon) and transcribing shop signs, trash-can notices, posters and graffiti along the way, including the best line in the book, scrawled on a wall in an Argentinian slum, 'Today is not my day, but I live', Pico Iyer ends up in Australia. Here, he con- cludes, the foreigner can catch

a sense of how everything brings him back to the natural state where he began: a lonely person in a Lonely, Lonely Place!!

Harry Ritchie is more gregarious and has more fun. Sort of, anyway. Presently liter-

ary editor of the Sunday Times, he has writ- ten a book about a summer on the Costa del Sol. In his introduction he warns

if you want to get stuck into a proper travel book, you've already wasted a few para- graphs of reading time.

He doesn't like travel books.

Basically I am sick to the back teeth of read- ing the damn things, so there's no way I'm going to write one.

Fair enough.

And another thing that this book isn't. It isn't, or certainly isn't meant to be, snooty. Gotcha mate.

The literary editor of the Sunday Times writes in a blokish, in-yer-face style:

The dithering at the entrance lark didn't take up any time at all. As every other prospective customer must have done, we turned round and got the hell out of there. An empty disco? Fuck you, Manuela. Eat Fifi.

If Piper's was Queen's Park at Hampden and Splash a Raith Rovers reserve game, the Palladium proved yet again to be Celtic v. Rangers on New Year's Day. Even this early — it was two in the morning — the Palladi- um was already going mental.

Before I read Here We Go, I confess I was prejudiced. But discovering that the author and I were both born in Scotland I felt much better disposed towards him. I agree with almost everything he says about travel writing. However, I read Here We Go with special care and sympathy because a few years ago, with a similar, anti-travel book in mind, I went to the same places as Harry Ritchie and after several weeks in Fuengirola, Torremolinos and Calahonda, I can guarantee that his account of the sun, the sewage, the drugs and the bore- dom, is numbingly authentic. Ageing ex-pat gay bars, time-share touts, cream teas and karaoke — it's all there. He might have gone to a Kiss-me-Slowly bullfight staged for tourists to experience le dernier cri of global culture, but it would have only con- firmed his prejudices as it confirmed mine. Gloria and Mandy are sick of transit.

This may be a book to be read at a sit- ting. I did and I laughed out loud two and a half times — twice more than when I read The Magic Mountain. It's the sort of book that makes you wonder what they mean by writing and whether it's the same as litera- ture. Harry Ritchie has an excellent ear for drunken monologue in tourist bars and the absurdities of syntho-pop lyrics and he has a dour humour, which English people would probably call 'wry'. The author should have the last word.

You may well wonder what, if anything, this book is. The more cynically inclined among you may well be assuming that it can be noth- ing more than an extended version of that primary-school essay, 'What I Did on my Holidays'. The strange thing is, you're abso- lutely right.

Peregrine Hodson's A Circle Round the Sun is published by Mandarin at f5.99.