Showing the holiday snaps

Travel: In 2002, Christine Breen, her husband, novelist Niall Williams, and their two children, Deirdre and Joseph, went travelling for nine months.

They rented out their cottage, took the children out of school and headed off. Being American, Breen was anxious to spend time in the US with her family, so they spent a lot of time there, in New York, California, Montana, Idaho, and Seattle. Then on to Costa Rica, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Bali. They cancelled their tour of China, afraid of contracting Sars, and went to Frankfurt and Paris instead.

The baffling thing is, you can't help wondering: who is this very overlong book written for? What market does it address? It's not a handbook for would-be travelling families planning a stint abroad, as we never find out any practical information about the journey, other than that most of the bookings for accommodation and tours were done on the internet and that there was clearly a considerable, but never specified, budget involved.

Nor is it a literary travel book: the prose is workmanlike and there are unforgivable clichés peppered throughout - things work like a charm, imaginations run riot, people hold on for dear life, there's icing on the cake, there's the luck of the Irish, hearts are in mouths, and everyone is on cloud nine.

Nor is it a book about an unusual journey, where the route or the method of travel is of interest in itself. The Breen-Williams brood fly around on their pre-arranged Oneworld Alliance route, and visit mostly popular destinations, such as Sydney and Bali, where we find out more about the posh hotels they stayed in than the places themselves.

Nor is this book a record of a journey from which the author emerges from the experience profoundly changed. We learn that Deirdre has written several well-received articles about the trip for an Irish teenage Christian magazine, Face Up, published by the Redemptorists, but we don't get an opportunity to hear her voice. Given that Niall Williams is a writer, this book would have been more interesting if the writing of it had been shared between the four people who undertook the journey, giving the reader four perspectives instead of one.

So Many Miles to Paradise is the written equivalent of looking at someone else's frankly not very interesting holiday photographs; a record of a journey really of interest only to the people who were on the trip.

Rosita Boland is an author and an Irish Times journalist

So Many Miles to Paradise: From Clare to Here By Christine Breen TownHouse, 317pp. €11.99