Roving
David Williams
James Starley graduated from sewing machines to traction and is the begetter, so my reference-book assures, of the Safety bicycle which made the penny-farthing a has-been and is, in all essentials, the modern bike. Mr J. B. Dunlop invented the pneumatic tyre in 1888 and these two pioneers 'ensured' (this is my reference- book again) 'the permanent popularity of the Safety, and subsequent developments of detail converted it into a luxurious vehicle'. By the mid-1890s people were feeling that to ride a bike was to be halfway on the flint road to heaven, and H. G. Wells was think- ing of 'The Wheels of Chance', and imagin- ing his little Mr Hoopdriver freed at last from dependence on trams and trains and enabled to swap environments simply through the exercise of his own leg muscles and of his dabhandedness at mending punc- tures.
John Foster Fraser, an enterprising young journalist of those days, had the no- tion of furthering his fame by riding round the world on his Rover. In the company of two friends he did it: 19,237 miles (not even the Safety could roll on water), 774 days, three continents, and no deaths by misadventure. He wrote a book about it of course, and this went through six impres- sions between 1899 and 1916. This is an abridged version and it calls for an in- troduction: how drastic have the cuts been? how did the three fare afterwards? Are Fraser and the Baron Munchhausen brothers under the skin? Did he really ride from Omaha to Chicago in five days? Did Dunlop in person follow them all across China on relays of horses, belted round with replacement tyres and looking like Monsieur Michelin in the ads? Because if he didn't how did they manage about spare parts? There's a photograph of him on the wrapper. He hasn't much of the look of the Baron but, with his perky little chin-beard quite the look of a younger Lenin: tougher than Lenin, though, but having, to judge from some of his narrated exploits, something of the old villain's ruthlessness.
A Chicago barber shaved him, and, as is the way of barbers, probed: 'Reckon you must hey hed pretty excitin' times?' Fraser has the imperial British answer: 'We've had no adventures. You see, we're Britishers, therefore there have been no perilous in- cidents; if we were American, we would probably tell you yarns that would put your hair into ringlets.' As Fraser talks to his barber in Chicago, so he talks to his readers all the way through, from St Pancras
Church back to St Pancras Church, taking in Shiraz and Shanghai on the way. From lesser breeds he expects subservience and usually gets it. He is Kipling without the subtlety, without the heart-searching, without the genius. The signature of Lord Salisbury is reproduced on his passport and there's no armour against fate stronger than that. Of course there are the Acts of God bad weather, bad roads, bugs, the brutalis- ing primitiveness of foreign parts, the awful lack of the substantial English breakfast but these aren't more than inconveniences to be brushed aside with merry quip.
Indeed there isin this book much of that late-Victorian jocosity of manner and it is sometimes hard to bear. Fraser is a jour- nalist, and full of the journalistic clichés of his time. Over and over again we're remind- ed that the United States is the land of the dollar. Nothing dates more depressingly than dated journalism — a lesson for us all. To set against this though there are some admirably vivid descriptive passages. The swift drop down the eastern slopes of the Caucasus into Asia for example is ad- mirably done, and the ride out of Hyderabad by moonlight has a genuine, unaffected feel about it. The Japanese trun- dle — zig-zaggedly from Nagasaki to Yokohama — occupies three chapters of the book and they are by far the most suc- cessful. Japan seems to have charmed him. He becomes natural and pleased and relax- ed. Geishas and the tea ceremony soothe away his boisterousness: it's like moving from a rock concert into the echo-y silence of the Reading Room of the British Library. This of course is the Japan that ex- isted before the business-boom and the grossly-gross national product. Fraser af- fords us a brief opportunity to revisit what has gone for ever.
But somehow he can't vary his narrative enough. Alps rise on ales, jungles dwindle off into deserts; squalid huts fade out and the Taj Mahal rises to replace them, yet the more all that changes the more it is the same thing. The trouble with him is that he can't put character on to the page. His fellow- travellers, Lunn and Lowe, are simply names: occasionally they have days when they feel, not surprisingly, just a bit off col- our and that's the nearest they ever get to being human beings. As for the people they meet — they're all just natives. They jab- ber, they gesticulate, they're incomprehen- sible, they threaten briefly, they cringe mostly, but they never amount to anything more than puppets in a shadow-show.
The true heroes of the book are the three Rover Safety bicycles. These products of British engineering would bring a lump to Mrs Thatcher's throat. No skimped workmanship, no built-in obsolescence. On they go, up stony mountains, through mire, through flood. When the road gives out they take to the railway track and leap from sleeper to sleeper, big-hearted steeple- chasers bounding over a Grand Interna- tional Aintree with the winning post set in some far unknowable distance. The book has pictures too but over most of these a faint autumnal mist broods. The Rovers, though, stand out prominently in most of them. One of them even, cleared of its pan- niers, leans aloofly against an inside wall while the three adventurers take tea with the geishas.
I could have done with a map.
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