Here and there
TRAVEL BOOKS PATRICK ANDERSON
To Mr James A. Michener, the best-selling American novelist, Spain has been a key ex- perience: 'any man interested in either the mystic or the romantic aspects of life must sooner or later define his attitude towards it.' In Iberia (Seeker and Warburg 80s) he has produced one of those physically huge books which require a lectern if one is to read them in comfort. The muscle-bound pages thud back at a momentarily loosening grip; the sluggish binding creaks and all but snarls as one presses it open to appreciate the splendid, wide- ranging photographs by Robert Vavra, together with the various charts and maps. Mr Michener is himself as solemn and solid.
Weak at evocation, he describes and docu- ments with postgraduate zeal. Taking as his starting-points certain cities and regions (for even he cannot cover everything), he lists prices, recalls history, copies down official notices, passages from plays, bits of poetry and folk- -song, interviews and speculates and probes. The reader will learn how to prepare gazpacha and the ubiquitous flan, how to distinguish between the concepts of duende and ambiente, how to cope with a tourist menu or to dis- tinguish between the bulls at a corrida. Often highly critical, but always, I think, fair, Mr Michener discusses a multiplicity of subjecis from the Inquisition to the stultifying selfish- ness of the aristocracy, from the difficulty of finding genuine flamenco to the danger of striking a member of the Guardia Civil or the fun of bird-watching in Las Marismas. This in fact, a remarkable book: I can think of nothing anywhere near so thorough.
Mr Michener explores an obsession; Mr Roderick Cameron, in Viceroyalties of the Wc 51 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 65s), shares some- thing- of of his grand scale but has set himself 3 professional traveller's task. Mingling the his- tory of the Spanish empire in Latin America with his own first impressions during 3 prodigious tour from Mexico to Bolivia, he has written a book of varying speeds and depths of penetration; always interesting and sensitively written, it none the less wobbles a good deal between historical inquiry and a
personal aesthetic quest which neither reveals enough of the author to win the reader's full sympathy nor unifies sporadic experiences into an artistic whole. As a traveller Mr Cameron is adventurous, now lost in giddy Andean mists, now exploring jungle-drowned Baroque ruins; nauseated as he nibbles a fried grasshopper, he can later smack his lips over a llama stew. His long drive from Lima to Cuzco is particularly exciting. As a historian, he moves us with the old near-incredible story of the gracious, courtly submission of Aztecs and Incas to a handful of jumped-up Spaniards from the hovels of Extremadura: bowing and smiling, these exotic followers of a death-wish embraced the knife, the rack and the stake. But the real heart, the real sensuousness, of a sumptuous volume depends upon its quite exceptional photographs.
The photographs in John Julius Norwich's Sahara (Longmans 50s) are equally splendid. They are so plentiful and so intimately related to the text that there is scarcely an incident, landscape or image which escapes prompt illus- tration, often in colour; in fact, I cannot recall another travel book with such documentary force and precision. Furthermore, Lord Nor- wich writes exceedingly well, weaving histori- cal background and social geography into a sensitive account of a journey by Land-Rover from Djanet to Bardai and Aozou, a camel- back tour through the Tibetsi and a walk of several strenuous days to see the Tassili rock- paintings. Here is the cleansing silence of the desert, with its static electricity, its combina- tion of freezing cold and furious heat; here the chaste and sculptural erg, whose dunes are the colour of tinned peaches, gives way to the sad and gravelly reg, to oases carelessly sibilant with water or to fantastic uplands yielding secret pools. Excellently printed in Japan, this book is a bargain at the price.
If on some remote moor or heath you should come upon a cheery middle-aged man, wearing beautiful Italian shoes and carrying a knapsack but otherwise stark naked, this will be Mr John Hillaby who, in Yeats's phrase, finds more enterprise in occasionally walking thus unencumbered. His Journey Through Britain (Constable 35s) has already been highly praised and I can only add my appreciation of the fine sanity and intelligence which holds inner and outer lives in balance. His aim was to walk 'from Land's End to John o' Groats on, if possible, anything but a road. With an eye for local character, an ear for changes in dialect and phraseology, much historical and scientific knowledge, abounding curiosity and a pleasant sense of humour, he encounters policemen and tramps, falls into bogs, shelters behind Pennine rocks, repels cows, dogs and hedgehogs, is sensibly critical of the dawn chorus and Sunday inhospitality, explores country pubs, indulges in aggressive fantasies when annoyed, and discourses on everything from the Grail legend to botany, geology, con- servation and the mysteries of the Gaelic.
Even more intrepid—and, of course, in a great tradition of women travellers—the Irish Miss Deryla Murphy explains her love of the unusual with a quotation from Whitehead: 'A diversification among human communities is essential for the provision of the incentive and material for the Odyssey of the human spirit.' She has already explored the Himalayas; now her In Ethiopia with a Mule (Murray 35s) describes the squalors, discomforts and sense of glorious independence amongst mountains and shepherds which she obviously needs to diversify the insipidities of existence. 'Bug-wise, last night was hell,' she remarks briskly and goes on to recount her collisions with baboons, hyenas, icy blasts and priggish missionaries as she and her animal, Jock, tramped the wilds, not to speak of the time she was robbed by a gang of bandits and soon found herself leading a successful punitive expedition against them. Although chatty, this is an unsentimental book and full of interesting ethnographic de- tail. 'It was blissful to be on my own again . . . Now I am at ease among the highlanders, for wherever I go, in this static, stylised society, everything seems familiar.'
In The Hills of Adonis (Heinemann 45s) Mr Colin Thubron can write better than anyone now under review, except perhaps Lord Norwich—he clearly has great talent—but I found his attempt to frame a walking- tour of the Lebanon in a quest for Adonis and Astarte a trifle portentous; its vibrant sen- sitivity seemed now and then overdone, and the delicate play of image and .rhythm fell sometimes on odd places, emphasised not so much the matters illumined as the blur around them, and made one curious as to what sort of man he is.
Finally and briefly, two cities: a most helpful Istanbul from the Turkish-speaking Michael Pereira (Geoffrey Bles 50s) and an efficient but uncharacteristically impersonal de- scription of the streets and districts of Paris in relation to history and historical anecdotes from Mr Peter de Polnay's Aspects of Paris (W. H. Allen 35s).
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