Literary travel writing, usually associated with the drumbeat of hooves across some distant steppe, seems at the moment to be echoing instead with the slow tread of the undertaker's muffled footfall. Within the last few years Ryszard Kapuscinski, Eric Newby, Norman Lewis and Wilfred Thesiger have followed Bruce Chatwin on their last journey. Others—notably Jan Morris and Patrick Leigh Fermor—have put down their pens or busied themselves with a final bout of anthologising.
At the same time, many of the most talented of the younger generation have turned their pens in new directions: Philip Marsden and Amitav Ghosh to the novel; Nick Crane and Sara Wheeler to biography; Anthony Sattin and Katie Hickman to social history. There are few new stars coming up to replace the old guard; of those who have written debut travel books within the last decade, only Suketu Mehta, Rory Stewart, William Fiennes and Jason Elliott can compare with the departing masters.
British travel writing is as commercially successful as it has ever been, but the books that are selling are not literary so much as frivolous "funnies"—comedians pulling fridges through Estonia and so on. Travel writing is still popular, but it is no longer the powerful literary force it once was. Even some travel writers themselves have doubted the status of the travel book as a serious work of literature. Paul Theroux, whose The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) helped kickstart the travel writing boom of the 1980s, selling over 1.5m copies in 20 languages, was one of the first to express his dislike of the publishing leviathan he had helped create: "Fiction is the only thing that interests me now," he told one interviewer. "The travel book as autobiography, as the new form of the novel—it's all bullshit. When people say that now, I just laugh."
MacLean is one of the contemporary travel writers who have done most to explore the boundaries and demonstrate the continuing possibilities of the genre in an age of globalisation and mass travel. Jonathan Raban once wrote: "Old travellers grumpily complain that travel is now dead and that the world is a suburb. They are quite wrong. Lulled by familiar resemblances between all the unimportant things, they miss the brute differences in everything of importance." This is something MacLean has always known. Like Robert Byron, Redmond O'Hanlon and Thubron, he has shown that the travel book is a vessel into which a wonderfully varied and unexpected cocktail of ingredients can be poured: history, philosophy, archaeology, ornithology, art, magic. In the right hands, an extraordinary range of human enthusiasms and experiences can be explored within the frame of the literary travel narrative.
MacLean has also shown the degree to which the genre can be cross-fertilised with other literary forms: political black comedy in Stalin's Nose, diaspora history in The Oatmeal Ark, biography in Falling for Icarus, exuberant pop writing in Magic Bus. Perhaps more interesting still, he, like Chatwin and Kapuscinski before him, has muddied the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction by crossing the travel book with some of the wilder forms of the novel. Like them, his work is oddly unclassifiable, dwelling in a half-lit area between fact and fiction. Like them, he uses the techniques of the novel—developing characters, selecting and tailoring his experiences into a series of scenes and set-pieces, arranging the action so as to give the narrative shape and momentum. Yet what is being written about is fundamentally true, and the characters, unlike those in most novels, are closely modelled on living originals, even when their identities have been changed for their protection.
Yet while MacLean's work is in many ways firmly within the canon of British travel writing, he—a Canadian from Vancouver and Toronto—is a very un-English figure. If the clean purity of the prose of Chatwin or Thubron derives in part from their personas as cool Anglo-Saxon observers, pinning their characters to the page with the detachment of Victorian insect collectors, MacLean's virtues are very different. For all the surreal touches, MacLean is a partisan who wears his heart—and his strong moral sense—on his sleeve. He gets emotionally involved with his subject matter and shows far more empathy for those he encounters than do most travel writers in the English tradition.
Nowhere is this more clear than in Under the Dragon (1998), a work powered by the author's outrage at the injustices, brutalisation and mass violation of human rights that he witnessed in Burma. "Outside Rangoon General Hospital, the bereaved thrashed through the crowd, hunting for missing relatives," he writes. "A dozen students crouched on the pavement, bleeding from bayonet gashes. A mother cradled her son. His smart high school uniform was shredded and his body stiff with rigor mortis. The naked male corpses with shaven heads were monks whom soldiers had stripped of their robes. Medical staff hammered a banner above the emergency unit: 'Doctors, nurses and hospital workers who are treating the wounded urge the soldiers to stop shooting.' The words were written in blood." In his exploration of the almost Dickensian downward trajectory of Ni Ni into child prostitution, or the arrest, imprisonment, breakdown and heartbreak of Ma Swe, MacLean is a better witness for the prosecution than an impassive and neutral observer of the generals of Slorc. He is aware of the beauty of Burma and its people, but the warmth of Burmese hospitality and the seduction of a Burmese smile never leads him to romanticise what he sees: this is above all a tale of the enslavement of a people, of forced labour, oppression, exile, gang rapes, prostitution, censorship and bloody massacres.
But for all its pain, Under the Dragon is a beautiful book. MacLean has a remarkable ability to evoke place and to bring a whole world to life in a single unexpected image. The visual precision of the writing, combined with its wit and pitch-perfect dialogue, its intriguingly fictionalised human stories, its hatred of injustice and its fierce passion for its subject, has given the work as much emotional punch as any non-fiction book by a writer of MacLean's generation. For many of us, it remains his masterpiece; and in the light of the continuing tragedy in Burma, it is now more relevant than ever.
