A Satirist in the Savannah
Ninety-Two Days. By Evelyn Waugh. (Duckworth. 12s. 6d.)
ON the dust-wrapper Mr. Waugh confronts us with a prismatic compass and an air of determination. He needed both. His 92 days were spent between Georgetown in British Guiana and Boa Vista on the Rio Branco, over the Brazilian border. The distance is less than 400 miles, but the going was bad, the living was hard, and Mr.. Waugh was for a great part of the time alone save for one or two unreliable servants. He endured considerable discomforts and some privations, and these he reports in detail and with irony.
It is the book's weakness—though not the author's fault that there was very little else to report. The territory he
traversed is known only to a handful of Europeans and Americans ; and after reading Mr. Waugh's book this seems a very natural and proper state of affairs. The Brazilian savannah is a monotonous desolation, and on the British side of the frontier the country is neither developed nor likely to be developed. From the traveller's point of view it has the disadvantage of being inadequately mapped without boasting the compensatory cachet of virgin territory. Simi- larly, the aboriginal Indians are in that half-baked state between savagery and civilization which substitutes only a veneer of incongruity for whatever charms or terrors they
may once have had.
Mr. Waugh met with an alarming number of vicissitudes ; but they were not of a sensational kind, and that transparent honesty which is one of his most attractive qualities as a travel-writer prevents the author from pretending that they were. Though the book is far from being dull—the digres- sions especially are often brilliant—it is as nearly dull as any- thing Mr. Waugh can write : which means, I would point out, low marks for tedium.
His original purpose of journeying down the Rio Branco to Mangos on the Amazon had to be abandoned because he was refused accommodation on the launch. But this purpose was in itself too arbitrary and aimless—it meant too little
to the traveller—to supply the reader with continuity of interest. That element of suspense which to a certain extent enlivens all narratives of human endeavour is lacking, and not even Mr. Waugh, in those forbidding wastes, can sub- stitute for it the alternative charm of the pieiresque fidneur.
The best thing in the book is the encounter with Mr. Christie, a religious gentleman of some eccentricity :
" I always ' (said Mr. Christie) ' know the character of any visitor by the visions I have of them. Sometimes I see a pig or 8 jackal; often a ravaging tiger.'
"I could not resist asking; And how did you see me ? ' " As a sweetly toned harmonium,' said Mr. Christie politely.
Here experience came up to scratch and gave the author material which he knows how to use better than anyone else. For the rest, " it is by crawling on the face of it that one learns a country," remarks Mr. Waugh with great justice ; and the reader who follows the ups and downs of his journey will get a vivid impression of that " mist of frustration " which usually dominates travel-in the less civilized parts of Latin America.
That the book is well written goes without saying. All the same, I doubt whether a man can be said to be either " of un- predictable descent," or " on an inscrutable errand." As for the photographs, they may, as the. publishers claim, be " of great anthriipoingical interest " ; 'but not to anthropologists.
PETER FLEMING.
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