SOME WRITERS will go to the ends of the earth to hunt down material for a
book, while others prefer to stay close to home. Peter Ackroyd is a home
boy, and, in his latest work, Thames: Sacred River (Chatto £25,
pp608), he shows what riches lie close at hand. Ackroyd walked the length of
the waterway from source to sea, but also plumbed the depths of many
libraries in search of insight. His account of our iconic river and the life
it has spawned is the perfect companion to his bestselling London: The
Biography. As rich and meandering and wonderful as its subject, this is one
of the books of the year.
Christopher Winn also follows the Thames in I Never Knew That About London (Ebury
£9.99, pp256). While he can’t match Ackroyd’s sweep, his book is a
confection of little stories and rescued facts, among them the location of
the first fuchsia grown in England (Wapping) and the country’s first speed
bumps (Fulham). Small enough for a stocking, big enough to last all next
year.
With the opening of the new Eurostar terminal bringing the Continent even
closer, Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France (Picador £18.99,
pp400) seems perfectly timed. Robb, biographer of Balzac, Hugo and Rimbaud,
has impeccable credentials for taking apart our preconceptions of France.
From the vantage point of a bicycle – for 10 years, he pedalled the back
roads – he searches for the country beneath the surface, and his discoveries
are eye-opening: the traditional taste of France, for instance, was not foie
gras or steak-frites, but stale bread. And as late as the end of the 19th
century, standard French was a minority language. Our neighbour will never
look the same again.
Tim Butcher takes on a very different sort of quest in Blood River: A
Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart (Chatto £12.99, pp272). Fifty
years ago, Butcher’s mother travelled the Congo with a girlfriend in perfect
safety. Butcher himself risked life and limb on roads that have returned to
jungle and a river that is increasingly lawless. It’s a bleak read, but it’s
touched by the author’s enthusiasm, humour and compassion.
Zimbabwe, which vies with the Democratic Republic of Congo as prize basket
case, is the setting for Peter Godwin’s When a Crocodile Eats the
Sun (Picador £8.99, pp352). Godwin, brought up in Zimbabwe and now
working as a journalist in the USA, tells the twin stories of his country’s
and his father’s decline. Zimbabwe’s collapse is made poignant by the
author’s obvious love for the place, but more moving and more memorable is
the picture he draws of the loss of his father, and the revelations that
emerge when he has gone.
Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish master of reportage who died earlier this
year, will be forever linked to Africa – some of his best work, including The
Emperor and The Shadow of the Sun, was set there. Africa also features
in Travels with Herodotus (Allen Lane £20, pp288), his last book. His
first newspaper editor gave him a copy of Herodotus, with whom Kapuscinski
felt kinship. The book, which combines travel, history and memoir, flits
across both authors’ lives and works, and leaves us with a surprisingly
upbeat view of a broken world.
Less upbeat, more political, and one of the most powerful travel books of the
year, is Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks (Profile £9.99,
pp240). A lawyer who studied in London, Shehadeh began walking in the hills
around his home in Palestine soon after his return in the 1970s. In six
parts, and six walks, he charts the changes to the landscape as the Israelis
built settlements and hemmed in the Palestinians – changes that have so
transformed the place, residents have begun to get lost. This is an eloquent
testimony to the human cost of political failure.
Nature, and our response to it, is the only growth area in travel writing, and
among several excellent books published this year, two stand out. It took
Jay Griffiths seven years to piece together Wild: An Elemental Journey (Hamish
Hamilton £20, pp374), and, while a little more time on editing some of the
overwritten passages would have been well spent, there is no getting away
from the book’s brilliance. Hoping to pin down our relationship with
wildness in a book was always going to be a tough call, but in this raucous,
unsettling, life-enhancing work, Griffiths comes close.
Equally extraordinary is Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees (Hamish
Hamilton £20, pp416). The environmentalist Roger Deakin, who died last year,
followed his earlier Waterlog (about swimming across Britain) with a
wide-ranging book about trees. From the wild fruit orchards of Kyrgyzstan to
the ash tree that kept guard outside his Suffolk bedroom, Deakin strung
together experiences, observations and arguments about our relationship with
the world to produce a book that I have returned and referred to again and
again since I first read it in the summer.
Finally, Eland Books has produced some of the most rewarding and surprising
travel anthologies of recent years. This year’s releases in the Through
Writers’ Eyes series (Egypt and Persia) and the Poetry of Place
series (Istanbul, Andalus) will make perfect travelling companions for many
years to come.
