05 April 2006
Bad travel writing
Grand Centaur Station by Larry Frolick (McClelland & Stewart Ltd., $26.99) is a combination mystery and travel book. Its subtitle is Unruly Living With the New Nomads of Central Asia, but as common sense should have told Frolick, and as he discovers, there are no such people. The mystery is “What is this book actually about?”
According to the back cover, the subject is “Who--or what--gives birth to history?”, and according to the author there’s only one way to find out: “To go straight into the rude, throbbing heart of the Asian steppe, and enter the infamous torch-city, which these civicidal passions claimed as their font, inspiration, and sanctuary from the beginning of recorded time. History’s volcanic maw itself: Outer Mongolia.”
Despite this barely comprehensible flourish, Frolick then spends most of the book in Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and China.
By page 193 (in Bokhara) the book’s subject is the “ancient war between the forces of good and evil”, but three pages later “my book is secretly about them, now, the Russians,” although that secret is subsequently well kept.
The book is actually about Frolick’s consciousness of himself as a writer, and he continually makes the mistake of assuming that everything he does is therefore interesting. His fascination with his long-drawn-out bronchial and bowel discomforts, and with the contents of his dreams, is unlikely to be shared by readers, who will leave 82 pages of Kiev and environs behind still wondering what the city was like.
The prose itself has a slangy propping-up-the-bar matey-ness while intermittently offering, flasher-like, glimpses of a larger vocabulary (dysphasias, endogamous, epiphenomenon).
There’s also a hint of the raincoat in frequent references to heels, makeup, and miniskirts, until the book sometimes seems about to reinvent itself as a slightly incoherent bodice-ripper: “tight black skirts barely restrained their innate carnality”; “her nylons played smoky zithers of paradise”.
Such bungled demonstrations of literary ardour are further undermined by a text otherwise littered with sentence fragments, misspellings, mistranslations, and dodgy history, badly in need of an editor.
“I ventured to declare,” says Frolick in Kiev, “that I was getting interesting material out of my trip.”
He should have put some of it in this book.
One merit that bad travel writing does have is that it's vastly more enjoyable to review. But here's something a bit better, but with some observations on structural problems with travel writing.
Comic travel writing not only permits the subtle rearrangement of events to improve their comic timing and the slight adjustment of focus to sharpen a caricature, but can relieve the author from the struggle to find vivid language or the need for research. When humorous situations fail to emerge, the writer can fall back on reporting internal sensations--typically of the feet and bowels--and personal social solecisms. It's lazy, but easy, to play the buffoon.
Tim Moore's Continental Drifter (Abacus, $18.95) has made him "A contender for Bill Bryson's crown as king of comic travels" according to the Sunday Times. Bryson, whose favourite adjective is "lovely", has made an art form of being ordinary and of reporting endless friendless evenings drinking beer.
A large readership will nevertheless follow him anywhere. But other authors who've yet to acquire the same level of public indulgence must find more than whimsy to excuse a book. Moore has opted for that road most travelled, the format labelled "in the footsteps of" .
This is the popular travel writing version of knight-errantry, the Quest Silly, which requires the use of comic props. The most common of these is the Dubious Vehicle, and Moore's choice is a dilapidated Rolls-Royce, to which he adds foolish clothing in the form of a purple velvet suit--he's willing to set out bait for comedy, rather than simply waiting Bryson-like for it to peek of its own accord from the baseboard of the everyday.
The props match the quest, however. Moore roughly follows the route around Europe of a 17th-century social climber of limited resources called Thomas Coryate, who travelled from London to Venice and back in 1608. Moore suggests that Coryate's trip was the first time that travel had been undertaken specifically for the purpose of writing a book--"a sort of Ruff Guide to Europe," the progenitor of many a pointless journey undertaken solely for publication.
But the result, Coryate's Crudities, was crass, and widely lampooned in its day."As well as sounding really very mad," says Moore, "the whole thing was clearly an extended fart anology." This is not a bad description of Continental Drifter, although the whoopee cushions are added deliberately.
As with Bryson's European ramblings (in two senses), an acquaintance with UK vernacular--"bollocks," "couldn't be arsed," "awful wankers," "knockers"--helps comprehension. This is the Benny Hill end of British comedy, although occasionally signs of an expensive education (vague acquaintance with Latin, for instance) peep out from behind a self-conscious blokeishness made suspect by occasional references to soccer-always the over-educated Briton's short cut to street cred.
If Moore can't find a cheap joke in a particular situation he delves into memory or lumbers circuitously round to set pieces: "God knows how you'd go about chatting up someone in Latin. Mind you, the morning-after banter wouldn't have been so tough: I saw, I conquered, I came."
He has the very British mixture of casual contempt for the garlic-reeking hordes across the Channel but fear of their casual and inimitable stylishness: "English people have more in common with a whole host of inanimate objects than they do with Italian people."
The sympathetic account of Thomas Coryate's rather sorry life will make you smile, and Moore is enlightening on the less savoury aspects of the Grand Tour. He's funny, if in a sometimes rather laboured way.
If you like Bryson, you'll probably like Moore more.
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