Going a journey
Caroline Moorehead
An Indian Journey Nicholas Garland (The Salamander Press £8.50) Eight Feet in the Andes Deryla Murphy (John Murray £9.95) Tuscany: An Anthology Laura Raison (Cadogan Books £12.95)
Before the political cartoonist Nicholas .1—,Garland left for a visit to India in 1982 a friend asked him what he was going to see. He replied that he wasn't quite sure, but that he'd know what he wanted to see when he saw it. And, in due course, after 11 days travel, he did indeed see it: it turned out to be not an erotic temple frieze or maharaja's palace, not a Buddhist shrine or marble mausoleum, but a road — a 'crowd- ed, hot, long, dusty Indian road' — packed with straggling pedestrians, wobbling cyclists, herds of goats, boys stoning monkeys and 'thin old ladies carrying huge loads on their heads looking like duchesses practising advanced deportment exercises.'
It is this alert artist's eye that shapes An Indian Journal, as it picks its way from one seemingly irrelevant oddity to the next, us- ing the pedestrian as well as the improbable to describe a setting. There is no rush and no waste: Garland is a master at proving how wide a tableau can be conjured up with few words. Drawings, as spare as the text, run alongside.
It was, however, a brave thing to do, to set off for a bare three weeks around a con- tinent he had never visited, to rely only on the observations of his own senses and re- actions to chance encounters along the way, and to hope that it would all provide enough material for a full length book, un- supported by history, literature or a real political framework. It is hard, at times, not to wish for a little more, not to feel a bit cast down when, for instance, he decides not to go on an illegal tiger shoot in the middle of the night with a collection of cowboy hunters, who might have provided a comic scene, if nothing more, nor to feel a certain sympathy for all those other travel writers who set off conscientiously for their voyages primed with historical insight and sociological fact.
This is a quibble: An Indian Journal is a very pleasant book, not least because of the easy agreeableness of its author, who con- veys throughout a scrupulous desire not to offend through ignorance. He reserves his bad temper only for Europeans, 'except- ionally plain and oddly irritating' with their Indian clothes and self-conscious passivity. For India, and the Indians, Garland has nothing but courtesy and diffidence.
The journal, written rather in the vein of a letter home to a cousin by a Victorian gentleman has added charm through being so honest. What traveller has not woken up in the middle of the night gripped by intense fear, convinced that he is about to die of water poisoning? Garland records in comic detail his sheer desolation as he broods through sleepless nights 'overwhelmed by the impossibility of ever catching these trains and finding these hotels that lay bet- ween me and my family.'
No such frailties afflict Dervla Murphy, the staunchest of travellers, who spent her youth in Ireland dreaming of distant and uncharted parts of the world and her adult life pursuing those dreams. Alone, on a bicycle, with the minimum of comforts and no change of clothing, Dervla Murphy has journeyed around India, Tibet and Baltistan, returning home with her ex- periences packed into notebooks and quick- ly marshalled into highly readable books.
Eight Feet in the Andes is her account of a four month, 1300-mile trek from Ca- jamarca on the border of Ecuador to Cuzco in the company of her daughter Rachel and a mule they named Juana. The three of them, Dervla Murphy on foot and Rachel riding Juana until she went lame, covered about 25 miles a day, groping up precipices, fording streams in flood, fighting off monster mosquitoes and fleas while surviv- ing on a diet of bananas, raw eggs and tinn- ed sardines. At night, they skulked inside a minute tent; at dawn, they struggled back into their sodden clothes that had by then turned to ice.
There is something both earthy and stoical in Dervla Murphy's approach to travel. She is unfailingly wry about the pit- falls of such hardiness, but she is also a serious student of the countries she visits, boning up on her history before she leaves. Her purpose in chosing the Andes was not necessarily to follow in the steps of the Conquistadors traced by Prescott in his History of the Conquest of Peru, but in- evitably much of the walk lay along that way: snatches of that terrible story, where they seem appropriate, are dropped effort- lessly into the narrative. She is also too humorous a writer to allow earnestness to intrude. A tone of ex- uberance and generosity dominates the book. This was not her first journey with Rachel but given her age and her schooling it is likely to be the last. As it is, the reader's admiration for the uncomplaining girl she was nine when the party set out, and her diaries, equally good tempered, contribute
i to the book — is boundless, as is a feeling of pleasure in the close and cheerful rela- tionship between mother and daughter. Armchair travellers, or those who visit
European cities with their guidebooks to dwell on the past are a very different breed. To them, rather than to the bona fide ex- plorers really belong the memoirs of other travellers, the evocations of past happen- ings ings in present surroundings. There is pro- bably no area of the world more beloved of foreigners or better served by descriptive writers than central Italy. Laura Raison's Tuscany.' An Anthology is a reminder of how many distinguished people have cross- ed the Alps and descended to the Arno to record their delight in the glory of Florence or Lucca, and come away remembering, as E. M. Forster put it, 'the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.' Shelley, Stendhal, Goethe, Mark Twain, Gorki, as well as Michelangelo and Lorenzo de Medici all contribute to this commonplace book, which guides the reader, in well thought-out chapters, from Dante's Infer, no to Tuscan pappardelle. My only reserva- tion is that the extracts are often too short, so that they register in the mind more as epigrams than as passages designed to prod the curiosity and the desire to read more.
Laura Raison's grandparents went to the Tuscany of Berenson and the Sit wells; her parents to San Sepolcro and the Piero della Francesca's. Certainly the leisured and reflective experience of those early visitors, who came to Tuscany as travellers and not as tourists — if the distinction is not imper- tinent — is gone, for that particular kind of intense revelling in Tuscany, which really began among foreigners with John Ruskin, died between the wars, and lives on now only in the memories of a very few writers — Harold Acton, Iris Origo — or in ac- counts written by travellers long since dead. Tuscany: An Anthology is also a nostalgic reminder of how dead that world now is.
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