10 Great Travel Novels
Travel books are certainly not all non-fiction, do you think for a moment Paul Theroux meets all those interesting characters and meticulously records all their strange conversations? But sometimes a novel is better than any travel book.
1. Mr Pip – Lloyd Jones – Bougainville, with its totally ignored and utterly brutal civil war only a stone’s throw (well a short flight) from Cairns in northern Australia, is the scene for this wonderful novel. Virtually nothing was written about this weird war which was essentially about a huge open cut mine and the billions of dollars it generated. I visited the mine in 1978 and then travelled through Bougainville on what felt like an amazing trip as part of my book Dark Lands in 2012. The Panguna mine site was like a dystopian movie set, something out of a Mad Max film.
2. Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut Jr – the best science fiction creates an alternative world or takes you travelling to a place we’ll never really get to, this classic Vonnegut title qualifies on that count, but also has a wonderfully warped sense of humour. Where is it? Well it could easily be Haiti under Papa Doc and if you want a vivid account of how we can really screw our world up with climate change then the invention of ‘Ice Nine’ certainly does it.
3. Mona Lisa Overdrive – William Gibson – a science fiction alternative world at its very best, so marginally displaced from corners of the world today (backpacker enclaves in Singapore, capsule hotels in Japan) you could swear you’d already been there.
4. The Magus – John Fowles – rereading it more recently didn’t cut it at all but the first read was perfect, it was first published in 1965. Only a litre of retsina would do a better job of transporting you to the Greek islands
5. Ordinary Wolves – Seth Kantner – You couldn’t ask for a better introduction to the confusion and problems of modern Alaska than Seth Kantner’s book. Like the author Cutuk grew up in a sod igloo, leading a life more closely aligned to wild Alaska than the Eskimo population of the nearest settlement. Despite his Iñupiaq name he’s torn between two lives, unable to be at home with either. There’s an interlude in Anchorage, where he doesn’t fit in either, and at the end you’re left lamenting the wilderness purity, the land of ordinary wolves, which may be gone forever. It’s a magic book.
6. Paris Trance – Geoff Dyer – if there’s a writer who zaps from one style and one type of book to another it’s definitely Mr Dyer and I’ve read a bunch of his books right across his writing spectrum. Paris Trance, the first of his books I read is a real favourite, in fact if you want the perfect introduction to what it might be like to be young and living in Paris then this is the book, it was published in 1998. I spent a year living in Paris two years earlier in 1996, but I was way older then than Dyer’s characters. In fact I had my 50th birthday in Paris that year and like so much of the year it was wonderful! Check my living in Paris blog, written over 20 years later. More recently I read, and enjoyed, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, another uniquely Dyer-esque novel.
7. The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver – tough countries generate amazing books, a rule of thumb that certainly applies to the Democratic Republic of Congo, AKA The Belgian Congo and Zaire before arriving at its current name. From Conrad’s Heart of Darkness via Naipaul’s A Bend in the River there have been assorted great Congo novels, none better than Kingsolver’s wonderful tale of an American missionary family led by a tunnel-visioned Baptist Bible thumper. They turn up at the worst possible time, as the country tumbles into independence and chaos. Patrice Lumumba, the tragic ruler of the short-lived independent post Belgium democracy makes an enlightening cameo appearance.
8. Eucalyptus – Murray Bailey – a great novel, half fairy tale, half natural history text and all of it in an absolutely spot-on Australian context. When his beautiful daughter turns 19 Hollland announces she can only marry a man who can identify each of the hundreds of eucalyptus – gum trees – on his property. Sure enough a mysterious young man turns up who is as good at story telling as he is about identifying trees. Or check my blog on my own little eucalyptus climbing.
9. 2 States – Chetan Bhagat – want a neat little introduction to how India works, you could do worse than this Indian best seller about two young MBA students, the guy a young Punjabi from Delhi in the north of India, the girl a Tamil from Chennai (aka Madras) in the south. As the book underlines you can’t simply fall in love with each other, you’ve got to fall in love with your partner’s parents, your partner’s parents have to fall in love with you and then the parents have to fall in love with each other. It’s a big ask particularly when one is from money-grubbing Punjab and the other from fecklessly artistic Tamil Nadu.
10. A Sport & a Pastime – James Salter – another young-love-in-France heartbreaker. Reading Paris Trance you kept saying to the character ‘don’t do it, please take care.’ Ditto in this book from America’s ‘most underrated underrated author.’ ‘As nearly perfect as any American fiction I know’ was another critic’s comment along with ‘he can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence.’ Which he did with mine. Published in 1967 A Sport & a Pastime is the perfect report from France in the ‘60s with the sexual revolution on its way.