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April 7, 2002
REVIEW: To stir and rethink
IN 1980, Robyn Davidson wrote a book about a journey she took across an Australian desert on a camel and she was surprised that it was classed as a travel book and she as a travel writer. She does not seem to have escaped from the labelling because here she is 20 years later entrusted to produce an anthology of travel writing, well journeys to use the nomenclature of the title. Her introduction to this handsomely produced book is erudite to say the least but somewhat bewildering because she refers to recent travel writing as a ‘clapped out genre’.
I was under the impression that the last 30 or so years had seen a huge surge of brilliant travel writing greatly inspired by the magazine Granta’s clever sponsorship of it. She is unimpressed by Bruce Chatwin and his ilk and feels that much of the recent stuff is tainted with ‘fibbing’ and an unwarranted dollop of fiction.
Her preferred period is the nineteenth and early twentieth century: all that stuff associated with land grabbing empires I suppose. And she devotes no less than 40 pages to a journey across Antarctica: a litany of frozen horror. Most of her 80 or so contributions are but a few pages long and they are divided into 27 geographical areas, but none for Sindh, Pakistan, Wales or Ireland. But then that is the professional hazard of an anthologist.
Eric Newby in his short Introduction to A book of travellers tales said anthologists were a vulnerable breed because people will inevitably criticize them for not including their favourites. But I think that is being somewhat defeatist. The joy of an anthology is for the reader to discover new and different slants on old themes. And this there is aplenty with Robyn Davidson’s anthology.
Her four contributions on England include one by an eighteenth-century Indian who is extolling a medicated vapour bath which hehad devised. Gore Vidal writes about Mongolia — now there’s a risk, how can we trust this fiction writer? In fact all too many of her contributors are better known in other genres. Two are poets: Derek Walcott has the whole of his Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech included which is a magnificent tour de force about identity, language and place. The other poet is Elizabeth Bishop relating a short and embarrassing car journey in Brazil. I suppose Davidson is making her point that there are precious few modern travel writers and even the iconic Chatwin is given a paltry two pages and that a visit to the writer Nadezhda Mandelstam who had preceded him with a ten page horror of life in Russian prisons and hospitals. James and Jan Morris have no entry at all. So this is an anthology for those who like being stirred up, who will enjoy rethinking exactly what travel writing is and what purpose, if any, it has at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
The Picador book of journeys
Edited by Robyn Davidson
Picador
IBSN 0330368621
528pp. £16
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