On travel writing
Some thoughts on Pico Iyer's new book, and some pieces from the back catalogue on travel and travellers.
My most recent piece of journalism, published yesterday in the Daily Telegraph, was a review of the travel writer Pico Iyer’s new book, The Half Known Life. In eighteen years of reviewing, I think I’ve only written three purely negative reviews, and this is one of them (Telegraph link here; extract from the unpaywalled version in the body below).
For several reasons (a loathing of airports, deep discomfort on being in a place where I cannot speak the language fluently), I almost never venture far outside the places I feel entirely at home (southern India, southern England). But I enjoy travel writing and read a lot of it. I find Iyer’s popularity and success entirely baffling and was pleased to have a chance to read one of his books closely to work out what I dislike so much about his writing. I put the text below (reversing a couple of the Telegraph’s editorial revisions I didn’t approve of).
For context, I should quote from a few old pieces I still stand by where I reflect a little more on the sort of travel writing I admire. I still like this much older piece, from 2013, about Anjan Sundaram’s account of reporting from the Congo (I admit I am a little embarrassed about the tone of worldly wisdom I feigned, to which I certainly wasn’t entitled then, if ever):
A passage early in the book has Sundaram explain his decision to abandon Yale, the US and a promising academic career in mathematics for the Congo and journalism. “I had left for Congo in a sort of rage, a searing emotion. The feeling was of being abandoned, of acute despair. The world had become too beautiful. The beauty was starting to cave in on itself—revealing a core of crisis. One had nothing to hold on to.” The active “I” of the first sentence turns into the impersonal “The feeling” of the second and the equivocal “One” of the last. The strained syntax reflects an underlying discomfort about where the writer’s self belongs in this narrative, front and centre or consigned to the margins, a discomfort that Sundaram never quite resolves. It might be a courtesy to ignore these accounts of himself that Sundaram feels compelled to give. . . . It is the task of a lifetime’s reflection to understand impulses of this kind; human beings are opaque to themselves in just these ways. Any attempt to force an explanation is an invitation to self-deception.
For an example of recent travel writing I unreservedly admire, I direct you to my 2019 review for the Oldie of Kathleen Jamie’s Surfacing, a quite magnificent book that has been cruelly neglected. Frankly, I regard Jamie as the finest living travel writer, one whose writing helps bring out the impoverishment of perception and diction in most of her contemporaries. I wrote:
Every page is a lesson in how to do it: how to write of the sublime without effusion; how to bring the self into the writing without narcissism. [Jamie] is generous in sharing her perceptions of other people and landscapes but guarded with her self-revelations, aware of the indecorousness of talking about an unhappy marriage, a family bereavement or a cancer scare while around her Tibetan monks are being disappeared, Native Americans are forgetting their languages and whole islands are disappearing under water. Her vocabulary is varied, unselfconscious and striking: kye; marram; dinked; smirr. She can capture whole lives – whole ways of life – in a sentence: some Tibetans she observes have ‘eyes crinkled after years of sun and dungsmoke’. And animals: an eagle in the sky is ‘a black hyphen above the near-bare crest of the hill’. … If she reaches for the stock phrase, she is quick to spot it. When she describes a shed as ‘derelict-looking’, she corrects herself at once: ‘That’s lazy.’ It matters to her whether it is a fisherman’s store or a smokehouse for salmon or a maqiq (sauna). It matters to her to look again, to see better.
Another writer I admire, of an older and more patrician generation, is Colin Thubron’s more old-fashioned, but still very fine, The Amur River (2021), about his travels through Russia, Mongolia and China. I wrote:
Thubron is a travel writer in the old style, for whom the writing is as much the point as the travel. . . . The Thubron style is marked . . . by a low-key lyricism, a downbeat elegance. It can be funny, usually at the expense of some officious bureaucrat (of whom Russia and China ensure a ready supply). But the dominant note is elegiac. On such a journey, he is never short of things to mourn: forests razed for timber; rivers plundered for roe; the sites of mass graves or former labour camps. The journey takes him to Buddhist monasteries, abandoned churches, forests full of bears and sables, and small towns that yield nothing but stories of loss. . . . Thubron has no defined political outlook, unless a sense of the tragic in human life is enough to count as a politics. He describes what he sees, in its occasional ugliness, and reports, usually without gloss, what the people he meets tell him, even when it is full of ignorance about the West and prejudice against the Chinese or Jews. He trusts his readers to detect his irony and to share his admiration for flawed individuals who exemplify genuine virtues: truthfulness, courage and, especially, resilience. . . . As a traveller, Thubron shows great persistence. The considerable planning and research that make his journeys possible – the books of history and anthropology read, the years learning or reviving languages and the months waiting for permits to militarised borders – are hinted at but left off the page. His Englishness is both a given, barely worth mentioning, and a constant point of reference. . . . [He] is self-effacing. His references to his own tribulations appear in parenthetical asides – ‘months later, X-rays show two fractured ribs and an ankle fibula broken’. He is ever stoical: ‘If the surroundings are diverting enough, the last ache becomes absorbed into the body, sinking a little beneath consciousness, until it is all but forgotten.’ . . . One feels for him and admires the tenacity of both the travel and the prose – never florid and seldom lazy.
And that brings me to Pico Iyer, a sorry parody of these exemplars.
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When Pico Iyer began his career with the essays in Video Night in Kathmandu (1988), he applied the familiar feature journalist’s method: turn up in some exotic modernising place, choose an arbitrary theme – Filipino music, Thai massage parlours, Japanese baseball – and use it as a way to ‘focus the material and to see a culture’. There was no need to learn any new languages; a glancing familiarity with the country’s history would do. His own exotic background as the child of academic Indian émigrés to Britain and America distinguished him adequately from the other Old Etonians who dabbled in the genre.
It was thin stuff even in the 1980s; the passing years reveal little evidence of any evolution. When we compare Iyer with older writers of Indian origin – V. S. Naipaul, for instance – it’s almost comical to think of them both as working in a genre called ‘travel writing’. Naipaul’s travelling always feels masochistic, as if the point is to stress-test the self, the better to yield new and surprising perceptions. Iyer’s new book, The Half Known Life, is remarkable principally for how little there is here to surprise anybody.
An afterthought. I realised after I filed this piece that my remark about V. S. Naipaul (‘the point is to stress-test the self, the better to yield new and surprising perceptions’) was not in fact original, but a weak echo of a remark in a fine (and under-appreciated) essay by Pankaj Mishra for the New York Review of Books in 2001 that has shaped nearly everything I think about this genre:
. . . very few writers from India or the Caribbean have published travel books. This is probably so because . . . the modern travel book is a primarily metropolitan genre: part of the knowledge that a powerful culture accumulates about its less privileged others or adversaries in the world. It is usually difficult to write one without the support of a trade publisher and there is also the problem of tone and perspective. The exuberant persona of, say, Bruce Chatwin is not easily worn by a writer from the colonies, no matter how anglicized he is; the certainties of the great power and wealth of the West that protected Chatwin on his adventures are not available to him. . . . the Indian or Caribbean writer has no “home” audience curious for news of the great exotic world; and to go as a half-native among the natives, reporting on behalf of a predominantly white audience, is often to subtly distort his own ideas and self; it is to pretend to embody the attitudes most widely shared by his audience in order to highlight the strangeness of the worlds and people he encounters. . . Nevertheless, the best kind of writing often gets done when the half-native writer remains unsure of his audience’s interest in his subjects, when the travel commission becomes for him a private opportunity to sharpen his vision of the world and of himself: the almost unbearable intensity of An Area of Darkness, V.S. Naipaul’s first book about India, the land from which his indentured laborer ancestors came to Trinidad, or of James Baldwin’s reportage from the South, is owed to precisely that relentless urge to transform the physical and psychological discomfort of travel into not “travel writing” but what is, for both reader and writer, new and unsettling perception.