TIMES SQUARE: As the world becomes a smaller place, the genre of travel writing has become wearisome in recent years: there's nowhere left to report on, and even if there is, the writer usually finds that someone with a can of Coke and a Styrofoam container from McDonald's has been there before him, and the T-shirted natives only want to know if he has met Britney Spears.
I am impressed then with the approach of the Whitbread First Novel award-winner, Sid Smith, whose winning story, Something Like a House, is set over a long period in China - a country Smith has never visited.
Sid Smith has defended his admirable stay-at-home policy by pointing out that, first of all, he was too poor to travel, and secondly, he found out all he needed to know about China by reading the memoirs of people who have spent a lifetime there - native Chinese included. Though pleading guilty to raiding other people's research, he added drily that he still had to wrestle with "the hardest bits of fiction: plot and character".
Fair enough. He also pointed out that Graham Green's Stamboul Train followed characters all the way to Constantinople, though at the time, the author had never been further east than Vienna. That's true - and James Joyce wrote Ulysses without ever, so far as I know, having visited Ithaca.
But what if you are a typical poverty-stricken novelist who would nevertheless like to travel?
Then you might (well) take a leaf out of Jonathan Franzen's book, his best-selling family saga The Corrections.
Franzen sent one of his characters to Lithuania, which he described in the book as a place of "chronic coal and electricity shortages, freezing drizzles, drive-by shootings and a heavy dietary reliance on horsemeat".
The result was outrage in Lithuania - but also an invitation from the Lithuanian ambassador in the US to visit his country and "discover the beauty, the vitality of our people and shared sense of values my country has with yours".
Accordingly, I (myself) have rather quickly emended my latest novel, wherein I dispatch a character to Mauritius (which I have not visited), and added a description of the island as "a lump of useless sand, permanently soaked in rain, inhabited by wastrels and vandals, with food only fit for dogs, and subject to regular tidal waves, volcanoes and earthquakes." I am confident the authorities in Mauritius will extend me a rather handsome invitation in due course.
Yet one does need to exercise some care when evoking countries and cities which one has not visited. Some years ago Mills and Boon, the romantic fiction publishers, used to warn its aspirant writers about the use of foreign settings.
It instanced a would-be author who penned something like the following: "High on a hill, Robin and Samantha stood hand in hand, united at last in their tearful, long-postponed joy.
"Reflecting their happiness, the stars shone above them as brightly as the lights from the unending stream of cars in the city below: Venice had never looked so beautiful."
I AM indebted to the comedian/barrister Richard Smithson, via the Erotic Review, for the following cautionary tale, which should interest anyone who has encountered problems with computer installations.
A friend has been having trouble with his computer system. Last year he upgraded to Girlfriend 1.0 from Drinking Mates 4, which he'd used for years without trouble. Apparently there are conflicts between these two systems, and the only solution was to try to run Girlfriend with the sound turned off. To make matters worse, Girlfriend is incompatible with several other applications, such as Lads' Night Out 3.1, Golf 2.2 and Playboy 6.0.
Successive versions of Girlfriend proved no better. Girlfriend 3.0 had many bugs and left a virus in his system, forcing him to shut down completely for several weeks.
Eventually he tried reinstalling Girlfriend 1.0 on top of Girlfriend 4.0 only to discover that these two systems detect each other and can cause severe damage to all his hardware.
Sensing a way out, he upgraded to Fiancée 1.0, only to discover to his dismay that this system in turn requires rapid upgrading to Wife 1.0.
However, while Wife 1.0 uses up all available resources, it does come bundled with FreeSexPlus. Imagine my friend's disappointment, though, on discovering that FreeSexPlus can only run on a well-warmed-up system, and even then doesn't guarantee access: it also refused some of the new plug-ins he'd been keen to try. Unfortunately, Wife 1.0 turned off.
Wife 1.0 also has a rather unattractive pop-up called Mother-in-Law, which can't be turned off. Recently he's been tempted to try the Mistress 98 add-on, but there could be problems. If Wife 1.0 detects the presence of Mistress 98, it will delete all MS Money files before uninstalling itself.
bglacken@irish-times.ie