Earning an easy chair
Anthony Sattin
GOING As FAR As I CAN by Duncan Fallowell Profile Books, £12.99, pp.279, ISBN 9781846680694 ✆ £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 If you were left a legacy by a friend would you tuck it away, blow it on art, or buy something for your home or the person you share it with? Notting Hill-based writer Duncan Fallowell decided to do what it says on the cover and go as far as he could. Why? ‘So that I need never travel again. Because I’ll have cracked the planet, finally solved the terrible mystery of distance, and can relax.’ It is a tall order, but one that he tries valiantly, humourously, persistently to fulfil.
New Zealand doesn’t appear to have been a country Fallowell knew any more about than the rest of us. It is on the other side of the world, split in two, endowed with great beauty and home to more sheep than people. Oh, and The Lord of the Rings was filmed there.
One other thing he knew was that Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier toured New Zealand with the Old Vic in 1948. The idea that two of the world’s most famous actors — and its most celebrated married couple — might tour a country not known for culture is intriguing. It adds an element of quest to the project as he decides to follow their route and hunt down their locations.
Fallowell’s earlier travel books have acquired something akin to cult status, particularly his first, To Noto, an account of a journey to southern Sicily. Like that book, this is a picaresque tale, the confessions of a rogue on his way to the end of the earth. As with all such tales and, it seems, as with New Zealand itself, some parts are more rewarding than others; mostly they are not cities or major towns.
Olivier and Leigh provide a handy prism through which to view this land beyond the horizon. As he follows their footsteps Fallowell finds again and again that the theatre where they performed or the hotel where they stayed has been demolished, usually on the orders of modernising bureaucrats. The wilful destruction of New Zealand’s civic architectural heritage is one of the book’s persistent themes.
Less to the fore but equally interesting is the way New Zealand has struggled in the modern world. When Olivier visited, the islands were politically, intellectually and economically dependent on Britain. When the mother country joined the EU, it left its child bereft and with many scars to show.
Fallowell’s frustration at these scars eventually breaks through the measured surface of his prose with a petulant rant. ‘I’m fed up with smashed-up towns. I’m fed up with beauty spots covered in shacks.’ Checking out by 10 am in hotels, ‘fat and ugly’ people and a long list of other aspects of New Zealand are also fired upon.
Even before publication, Fallowell has achieved the rare honour for a travel writer of making front-page news in New Zealand and being on the end of a slurry of hate mail from angry islanders objecting to his criticisms. Most of these objectors have clearly not read the book, for in spite of the anger at physical destruction and the frustration at what he sees as the islands’ intellectual, emotional and sexual backwardness, Fallowell clearly falls for the place.
This isn’t a book for everyone. Some will find his diary-entry style too self-indulgent. Others will be put off by his sexual preferences, for this is also an account of a search for like-minded men, eventually found through escort listings and in the basements of gay sex shops as well as in bookshops and wineries. But beyond the pricks and the petulance lies a meditation on how it feels to go to the ends of the earth and an unapologetic account of the life he found there.
One New Zealand bookseller has been quoted as warning that, ‘No one puts the knife into nice, green, friendly, scenic, hip, cultured, espresso-addicted NZ and gets away with it.’ Fallowell appears to have done. I am not convinced that he has solved ‘the terrible mystery of distance’, but hope he has at least reached a state where he can relax.
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