06 February 2006
Tosh
I've just stumbled across the text of a book review I wrote a couple of years ago, which when printed in a paper in the author's home town resulted in more letters to the editor than anyone could remember such a review ever generating before. Some were from colleagues and in one case even an ex-girlfriend writing to say how I'd made their day. Sadly they all refused permission for publication.
So remember if you insist on publishing tosh in book form you may be unfortunate enough to fall prey to a reviewer who knows tosh when he sees it, and knows that really bad books make the best review material. And while today's paper is tomorrow's fish wrap, interested parties may cut out your reviews and stick them to their fridges.
On the Trail of Marco Polo review
Once it seemed that every arts graduate believed him- or herself pregnant with a great novel, only the need to make a living preventing it from coming to term. Most never found time to discover just how difficult even the first paragraph would be, luckily allowing them to keep intact their image of themselves as Hemingways manqué.
Then, extended trips around Asia were still alternative. Now it’s those who haven’t pogoed across the Gobi who are the unconventional ones, and the travelogue has replaced the novel as the daydream magnum opus-that-might-have-been. The banana pancake paradises of Asia are full of the footsore catching up with their diaries. Brady Fotheringham’s On the Trail of Marco Polo (McArthur & Co., Toronto, $24.95) seems to be one of these.
The title, at once populist and meaningless, sets the tone for the whole book. Polo has been dead since 1324 which makes him a little hard to pursue, and Fotheringham doesn’t follow any route usually attributed to the merchant, although he travels by air, bus, and bicycle from Beijing to Islamabad, and briefly into Afghanistan.
The cover ill-prepares you for the contents. Fotheringham was “determined to cycle the desolate Chinese desert”, but not determined enough, apparently—he skirted most of it by bus. He “cycled over the world’s highest pass.” The Khunjerab is in fact merely the world’s highest paved-road border crossing.
But getting through the book is itself a dangerous journey, as it swerves from cliché (“The journey is the destination”) to tautology (“who navel-gaze at themselves”), and from freewheeling grammar (The Romans “wondered where this ‘wool of the forests’ was arriving”) to the completely incomprehensible (The Silk Road’s “brutal history is an indelible stamp on the annals of Central Asia”). Much of the historical material is inaccurate filler between thin narrative, and even simple place names are misspelled.
Fotheringham knows no Mandarin, and can narrate little but his own bewilderment in China, even failing to record accurately what he sees, placing the Great Hall of the People inside the Forbidden City (built centuries earlier), and failing to notice that the common “dog-lion” of his photo-caption is a completely different and rarer beast, the Chinese unicorn. He makes unwise detours into other foreign languages, getting both the German name of the Silk Road and the Kyrgyz word for their white hats wrong.
He plans to survive by using his “street smarts”, but apparently has none. On arrival he is immediately cheated by a taxi driver, and then loses his credit card. He grossly overloads his bike but takes inadequate provisions, photographs border installations and has his film forcibly exposed, and suffers a series of thefts through his own carelessness. He spends anxious hours detained in police stations. Regrettably, they let him go.
In amongst sanctimonious pro-traveller, anti-tourist bleating (from a man who makes straight for McDonald’s and the Hard Rock Café, and plays rock music through handlebar-mounted speakers) there are enough howlers to confirm Fotheringham as the William McGonagall of travel writing.
The Chinese were “no different from us than we were from them.” “Canada is big, but you never get close enough to see it except from an airplane.” “If you’ve never seen a camel in person, you’ll never forget one.” “It would be about as inconceivable for Tibet and Xinjiang to secede...as it would be for Liechtenstein to successfully invade Europe.”
The book does raise one interesting question, however. How on earth did it get into print?
The answer to this last question, by the way, at least as volunteered by several who wrote in to the paper publishing the review, was, "His father is a famous political journalist." And perhaps the worst footnote to all this is that presumably as a result of this connection The Globe and Mail, once Canada's only nationally distributed broadsheet and a paper that takes itself far too seriously, dubbed the title one of its 'notable books' for that year, and without the slightest irony.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment