Round the Earth
ADVENTURES IN PARADISE. By Willard Price. (Heinemann, 21s.) THE SEVEN LITTLE SISTERS. By William Willis. (Hutchinson, 16s.) south-west corner of Asia Minor. But, as admirers of Miss Stark will expect, upon the clear-etched frame of physical travel rises a zikkurat of allusion, comment and philosophy.
Here is travel of the body and mind, a true genius that no flood of lesser adventures can ever swamp. Whether she contemplates a monastery or ponders on the life of nomads her touch is sure, her effect perfect. I urge anyone who is thinking of writing a travel book to read The Lycian Shore. If they still go on with it, they should write a very good book indeed.
Mr. Durrell's aim is not so high, though his travel books are gems of a lesser kind. This time, in The Drunken Forest, he is in South America, collecting animals and birds, and those who are already fans will not need to be told how warmly he recounts the adventures of collecting.
Sometimes his distinctive, amiable style betrays him and he becomes avuncular : the result of this is rather like one of those boys' books in which the young reader absorbs information through a half-witted nephew ('We'll need ten yards of rope, a sharp knife and a forked pole if we want to catch that little fellow, Dick."Right-ho, Uncle Gerald.') And now and then a peculiar tweeness comes in. Perhaps this is because Mr. Durrell, at heart, like all collectors, has a sense of guilt about riving our little animal friends from their lairs and imprisoning them in cages. This guilt he mocks, and when (as happened) he had to turn all his prizes loose because a revolution broke out in Paraguay he smugly recounts that none of them wanted to leave. However, one feels that he is not as happy about this as he says he is.
Bare Feet in the Palace is the latest work by another well- known author. This is an account of a year spent in the Philippines in 1954, and her view of those confused islands is picturesque rather than realistic. Like all women writers on the Far East (with the exception perhaps of Emily Hahn) Mrs. Keith falls irretriev- ably in love with her subject and even poverty is something to be made a word-picture of. The style is a curious one (the historic present is not a happy tense) but if anyone wishes to learn some- thing about the Philippines, this is an adequate book. At the thought of Samoa and Tahiti most men lose all sense of proportion. Let the Coca-Cola salesmen do their worst, they can but graze the surface of those placid islands. We know that they are earthly paradises, and here Willard Price, in Adventures in Paradise, confirms our romantic view.
He is a realistic writer, and gives the price as well as the aroma of everything, and his verdict is that even after Stevenson, Maugham, Gauguin, and Nordhoff and Hall, Tahiti is a golden land. It is a snappily written book, with an irritating system of paragraph headings, but if the reader will not be put off by this he will enjoy a delightful book. Unlike the dream inspired by so many travel books we need not plod over burning hills or shovel through snow or argue with deaf and dumb frontier guards to reach this promised land. If we can show we are not going to be a liability on the Tahitian government and raise the fare we can go tomorrow to this place where there are no local words for licentious, lascivious, incestuous, impure, indecent, obscene, libidinous and salacious—where a man will introduce himself as Gauguin's son.
Mr. Willis is the lone-wolf explorer, the fanatic who either turns into a T. E. Lawrence or, as here, makes a raft of balsa wood and floats, alone with a cat and a parrot, across the Pacific from Peru to Samoa. The Seven Little Sisters is the §tory of this voyage. This sort of achievement is not unique any more, but it is still immensely exciting, and Mr. Willis, a German-Czech, is able to answer the sort of questions a journey like this always inspires, the most important being : what was it like? It was grim, it was horrible and Mr. Willis nearly died. Now and then he writes like Robert Service and we are rather embarrassed, but none the less it
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