Amazonian: The Penguin Book of Women's New Travel Writing edited by Dea Birkett and Sara Wheeler Penguin, 250pp, £7.99 in UK
Amazonian? The title of this excellent collection is misleading. The toughness of legendary women warriors is not an attribute required or desired of contemporary women travel writers. The pre-eminent advantage of the best of them is that they are not tough.
Travel writers used to be daring adventurers who explored previously unknown remote regions of the world. Now that "there are no longer any spaces on the map", as Dea Birkett and Sara Wheeler point out, and "a sweat-soaked and life-threateningly dangerous journey no longer justifies a travel book", travel writers must have the imaginative sensitivity to explore themselves.
"The long red line drawn across continents - the Cape-to-Cairo kick - has been replaced by an emotional journey," the editors write. "And women have a head start here: the emotional terrain is traditionally seen as the territory of women writers." This proposition may make the ghost of D.H. Lawrence gush hot tears and spit bile, but I suppose that most readers, certainly most women readers, would agree that Birkett's and Wheeler's contentious feminist generalisation is generally true. In this paperback of medium size there is a rich variety of convincing evidence in their support.
Ginny Dougary, who was born in Kuwait and has lived in Sydney, New York and London, gropes close to a definition of the peripatetic temperament that helps to motivate a good travel writer: "I don't know what it is that makes people want to travel. Some say that it's in the blood, or that it's a desire to escape, or to reinvent yourself .. . But I am happy not to belong. It feels like my natural habitat."
Alone in "a cathedral-like ravine" in Arctic ice, Doughary achieves an epiphany, weeping "with a strange kind of joy. It is the closest I have come to a spiritual experience."
At the other extreme of the emotional gamut, Suzanne Moore, a Londoner, in a stab at gonzo hipness, tells of fear and loathing in a piece she calls "Miami Vice": "Did he really have a cowboy hat on? She couldn't make it out - the drugs were starting to haze her up."
According to the Notes on Contributors, Lesley Downer "was a Japan specialist until she discovered Africa". Describing her experience in Accra and Takoradi as a white woman in love with a black Ghanaian, she describes her admirable literary techniques in the most modest terms: "While I looked around with the magpie eye of a journalist, snatching up shiny nuggets of information, . . ." It is true that her memoir, like some of the other writers' work, would read well in any upmarket newspaper Sunday magazine. That is meant to be a compliment.
Much of this "New Travel Writing" is interestingly opinionated autobiography in exotic settings, more often than not in crisis or at least severe social and economic stress - Lucretia Stewart on Cambodia, for example, Sara Wheeler on Bangladesh ("The only thing most people had the energy to care about was survival.")
Elisa Segrave, in "Posy: A Portrait of an Expatriate", writes with delightful quiet humour about the self-indulgence, bigotry and re deeming kindness of a well-to-do voluntary exile in Majorca. Her foreignness and the foreignness of the place complicatedly interact.
Dea Birkett contributes an elegy to an obsolescent port, "Folk stone: A Love Affair", In "Tinsel and Kalashnikovs", Shena Mac kay describes "the perpetual battle between dust and glitter that is Pakistan". Imogen Stubbs makes witty observations on a visit to Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Kate Pullinger, a displaced Canadian, writes unrhapsodically about "the dreadful cod Britishness" of Victoria in watery British Columbia, and about London, "the heart perhaps, or at the very least the cirrhotic liver, of the UK".
But the most sombre sketch of urban blight opens Mary Russell's report on "the benign and fruitful countryside" of Bosnia after the civil war. She tells of returning "home to a city of screaming police sirens. To newspaper reports of paedophile clerics, of politicians taking backhanders, of syringe attacks on taxi drivers. Where pavements are stained with chewing gum and urine . . ." Los Angeles? No. Russell's home is Dublin, where, after all, she seems to feel, though there are no landmines, it helps a woman to be Amazonian.
Patrick Skene Catling is a novelist and critic