In 1946, Evelyn Waugh, like so many others before and since, predicted the end of travel writing. "I do not expect to see many travel books in the near future," he wrote. Shocked and embittered by a war that had laid waste to Europe and produced technological innovations such as the jet engine, he lamented the imminent demise of the "old" kind of travel. In the new world of "displaced persons," light-hearted journeys now seemed anomalous. "Never again, I suppose, shall we land on foreign soil with a letter of credit and passport and feel the world wide open before us."
Yet despite this prognosis from Waugh-every bit as distinguished a travel writer as he was a novelist-travel literature would rise from the grave once more. If the first boom came in the Victorian era, during the height of the British empire, and the second occurred during the 1930s pomp of Waugh and contemporaries such as Robert Byron, Gerald Brenan and Peter Fleming, the 1970s and 1980s saw the genre reach new heights of popularity with the emergence of Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Colin Thubron and Jonathan Raban.
Now, though, all the paths ahead seem to have disappeared. With many younger writers of travel turning to history, biography or fiction, the genre has never felt so redundant. True, there is still a market for the lightweight entertainments tossed off by Pete McCarthy and Tony Hawks, but writers of the literary form seem to be staying at home. It is too early to declare its final death, but in bookstores across the country "travel literature" shelves are dwindling, publishing reps are finding accounts of journeys increasingly hard to place and sales are falling.
This, of course, relies on quite a narrow publishers' definition of the genre. Paul Fussell, in Abroad, his book about British travel writing during the 1920s and 1930s, gives a broader definition of travel books as "a sub-species of memoir in which the autobiographical narrative arises from the speaker's encounter with distant or unfamiliar data, and in which the narrative-unlike that in a novel or a romance-claims literal validity by constant reference to actuality." And for others, like Thubron, even that autobiographical element is dispensible: "Travel writing," he has said, "is one culture reporting on another."
Redmond O'Hanlon, author of such classics as Congo Journey, widens its reach still further. "The perfect travel book," he writes in the introduction to Into the Heart of Borneo, "should be as true as fiction, and use the methods of fiction." O'Hanlon views the form as endlessly various, encompassing "the novel, reportage, biography, history, letters, diaries, reconstructed notebooks."
Imaginative embellishment in travel writing has been around as long as the genre itself. In 1875, when Europe had almost finished discovering the rest of the world, up popped Captain JA Lawson, with his Wanderings in the Interior of New Guinea. Captain Lawson's travels had apparently taken him seven months, during which time he claimed to have made more discoveries than Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke put together-including a waterfall higher than Niagara, two rivers which he named the Royal and the Gladstone, and, to cap it all, a mountain 3,755 feet taller than Mount Everest. He climbed 25,314 feet in nine hours, but turned back when he began to bleed from his nose and ears.
Others followed in Lawson's unreliable footsteps, none of them denting the popularity of travel books. Peter Bishop, in The Myth of Shangri-La, says that "travel writing is not concerned only with the discovery of places but also with their creation." Norman Douglas admitted inventing characters; whole passages of Robert Byron's accounts bear little relation to real events. Evelyn Waugh, according to Bishop, behaved as if "descriptive passages do justice to potentialities rather than to facts." The description could apply to any number of Bruce Chatwins, Rory MacLeans or Tahir Shahs.
The crude explanation for the current wane in travel writing is that "there is nowhere new to discover." But the complaint is an old one. In 1936, Graham Greene did not attempt the "absurd and reckless trek" of 200 miles that took him through Sierra Leone, French Guinea and Liberia (forming the basis of Journey without Maps) because he wanted to discover new tribes. He was impelled by boredom. What he found was exactly what he was trying to flee: "a deeper boredom on the long forest trek than I had ever experienced before." So he "rashly proposed to make memory the very subject of this book."
The real heart of the crisis in travel literature lies in its one essential element: the confident "I," the voice of the narrator, the authority in whom the reader has traditionally placed his trust. In a world where we have difficulty with the concept of authority in general, there is an increasing unwillingness to see the world through the eyes of just one person.
I am the author of two travel books. The first, The Lost Tribe, purported to be the story of a "lost tribe" that had been "discovered" in a remote part of the Papua New Guinea jungle. But rather than a work of anthropology, it ended up being the story of a frightened young white man a long way from home. I decided to make my trip after reading a snippet in the foreign pages of the Daily Telegraph describing how a group of stone age nomads had been discovered and "rounded up" by missionaries. Drawn by the dramatic possibilities of this clash of cultures, I applied for permission to visit the tribe. I was refused, but-having already persuaded a publisher to back the project-decided to go anyway. The adventure narrative that I had in mind took an unexpected and most newsworthy twist when, on a rainswept night, lightning hit one of the houses in the tribal village and killed the people inside. The villagers blamed me and my carriers for the disaster and I had to flee for my life.
Looking back, I can see that the author of The Lost Tribe-a reckless na?f I now scarcely recognise as myself-was emblematic of the modern decline of the travel book. While the book itself continues to sell, it speaks of the moment when travel writing could go no further. Just as the narrator became a troublemaker, and was forced to run, the very idea of the romantic literary wanderer was becoming a cultural irrelevance.
Nevertheless, finding myself cast as a travel writer, I pressed on. My second book, Wild Shore, tracked the predations of the ferocious bull shark from the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua into the centre of the country. True to O'Hanlon's definition, it was a work of history, landscape description and, I like to think, narrative force. But it was also the last travel book I will write. By the end, I was feeling the constraints of the genre; in particular the fact that everything had to be filtered through my eyes. I yearned to write a more general kind of non-fiction, one in which a story could be told from any number of viewpoints, in which imagination could run wilder. So my new book, The Plague Race, tells the story of the controversial discovery of the cause of bubonic plague. It is a far more complex weave than a travel book could have been. There is a fictional strand, reportage, an investigation into plague in the world today. And not once, thank goodness, do "I" come into it.
Of my travel writing contemporaries, it is hard to think of one who is currently at work on a travel book. Sara Wheeler, Rory MacLean, Katie Hickman, Nicholas Crane, William Dalrymple, Jeremy Seal, Anthony Sattin-acclaimed travel writers in their 30s or 40s-have all branched out into different fields. Philip Marsden, like Crane a previous winner of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, has just published his first novel.
Their reasons, however, are various. Hickman believes that, "with the honourable exception of Colin Thubron, there are only one or two decent travel books in any person. Travel books are works of passion: to write one you have to be obsessive about a place, and it is simply not possible to develop a mad passion for a different country every other year." Crane, author of the award-winning Clear Waters Rising, which told the story of his epic trek across Europe's mountain spine, has just published the first English-language biography of the mapmaker Gerardus Mercator. For him, "with travel writing, it's pretty difficult to come up with an original idea."
The "I" narrator of the travel book is resolutely anti-materialist. He travels cheaply, avoids package tours, has no "job" as such. What relevance does he have to the suburban commuter, the harrassed housewife? Waugh's pronouncement was, perhaps, not wrong, just premature. We really have ceased to dream of "the world wide open before us." We appear to dream of very little.
The underlying reason that serious travel writing is threatened as never before is the culture in which it finds itself at the start of the 21st century. The 1980s, which saw the third major travel writing boom, was an age of egocentricity which perfectly suited the central "I" of the travel book. William Dalrymple's breezy ex-university persona in In Xanadu, the elusive and orchidaceous Chatwin, even early-vintage Peter Mayle: all were examples of writers supremely confident of being taken seriously.
In the post-cold war world, new political and cultural definitions are still struggling to emerge. The lone traveller, essentially an investigator of the strange "other," seems a poor authority on the strangeness of what is happening on his own home turf. An uncertain global picture is best mirrored in different kinds of literature. In both British and American fiction, there has been a return to social realism: Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides are architects of cultural complexity. Popular history is part of this trend, too: an attempt to rediscover national and cultural identities through our own past. Better that than follow a wandering narrator around regions which may well have changed beyond recognition by the time his book comes out.
