On the road with the pick of the bunch

TRAVEL: MARY RUSSELLreviews The New Granta Book of TravelEdited by Liz Jobey Granta Books, 429pp. £25

DARK MORNINGS, darker evenings: time to draw the curtains, pull up an armchair to the fire and go travelling. Granta’s new book of travel writing has the pick of the bunch: WG Sebald, Thomas Keneally, Lavinia Greenlaw and 23 others, with an introduction by Jonathan Raban, who tells us that, “because the travel narrative has so often been treated with critical condescension, there’s a need for an anthology like this to remind us of the form’s elastic range and literary potential”.

What’s interesting about the selection of Liz Jobey, the book’s editor, is that many of the contributions are not about the journey but about what the writers find when they arrive. Paul Theroux keeps returning to an episode when he was teaching in Africa and found himself trapped by his sexual desire, which soon wore him out. A casual encounter in a run-down bar led to a week of highwire sex with a stranger whose brother then held him prisoner in a hut until he had paid for his pleasure. Forty years on, Theroux still doesn’t know why he allowed this to happen.

Freya Stark remarked once that a writer should always have handy a respectable reason for travelling for those awkward people at immigration. (And, no, curiosity is not a respectable reason.) Decca Aitkenhead has hers ready: she’s writing a book about global club culture that takes her to those parts of Thailand where you can buy lots of cheap sex. (Don’t say prostitutes, say bar girls.) The role of the bar girl is to make people feel good about themselves, fat, baldy fellas especially, so that they spend more cash at the bar of which the girl in the sparkly bikini gets a percentage. The other people made to feel good were women backpackers, who often joined a bar girl dancing on a table to show their solidarity with the sex workers.

Far away from all this is the poet Kathleen Jamie’s search for the impoverished mineworker’s home of her great-great- grandparents in the Scottish lowlands. Her (Irish) mother never spoke about her origins because, says Jamie, of her “Presbyterian distrust of idle fancy”.

Jamie does not carry that burden and sets out across rough terrain armed with three lots of census returns. In 1901 each house had one window only, and when the miners’ union men come they note that the latrines, provided by the mine owners, have no doors and the boiler house, for washing clothes, has no roof. This is writing of the moment, without sadness or regret, so that, having located the site of the family homestead, she turns away, leaving behind nothing but hazel trees and cobwebs in the long grass.

Wendell Steavenson follows a line of journalists, including Antjie Krog and Anna Funder, whose travel writings show their craft: facts, figures and crisp reporting at the heart of the story. In Steavenson’s case, it’s Baghdad after the invasion, a contribution of special interest to me as, two years previously and one month after the twin towers came down, I had arrived there and found a quite different city.

But it's the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres who takes us into unknown territory with his Life and Death of a Homosexual,written in 1972, telling the story of a Paraguyan tribe, their rituals and strict gender-based society and what happens when one of their number exchanges his arrow for a (woman's) basket. A heartbreaking story told without judgment but full of compassion.

Then – and where would we be without him? – comes the bumbling, genial Englishman in Africa, in the person of Dorset-born Redmond O’Hanlon (below). I have to confess I once wrote to him suggesting that we do a journey together and write our separate accounts of it, but when he left a message on my phone I wimped out and failed to return his call. Reading his contribution here, I may have been right. Off to Congo in search of the Congo dinosaur, he falls out of his tent one morning and helps himself to last night’s supper “of male monkey stew still tasting of unwashed crotch”.

Together with his team of assorted helpers and minders – this is, after all the Marxist People’s Republic of Congo – he comes across the body of a young boy, with villagers sitting around waiting for justice to be done. They will all dance, and if God took the boy then that’s that, but if he died by foul means then the spirits will go into action. And so they dance, Redmond too, “ five steps forward, a half turn to the left, a half turn to the right, five steps back and on round the circle”.

The thing about O’Hanlon is that he knows his stuff. Squatting behind a bush, he looks up to see “a vulturine eagle, the only (mainly) vegetarian bird of prey in the world”. And though he’s a biologist of some standing, he’s still open to unscientific bemusement. Arriving at Lac Télé, his companions start shouting across the lake, reassuring the spirits that they mean well. Then there’s a bit of boasting. Doubla goes into the bush with his gun and returns with an antelope. Nzé is unimpressed: “My grandfather didn’t need cartridges . . . at night, he turned himself into a leopard and in the morning, we had bushpig.”

To his surprise, says O’Hanlon, nobody laughed. After all, anything is possible when you’re out without your gun.

Mary Russell's travel book Syria Is My Home Is Your Homeis published next month