In an interview the other day the travel writer Paul Theroux revealed he was not at all keen on certain types of travel writing, and indeed writers. "Just being sick isn't a subject. I hate that Colin Thubron - `I had a tummy ache; women are pestering me all the time...' " Also, he points out that books about Italy tend to be a cliche: `Oh, my house in Tuscany, my life in Provence, oh, we had lemons, a glass of wine ' - these people are basically saying `I'm here, and you're not.' " And there's the would-be-amusing travel tale - "as in, `silly old me, I bought this tent for a pound in a church sale and here I am in Madagascar and, goodness me, it leaks!' Dervla Murphy - a terrific writer - she occasionally does it."
Theroux has a point, though he himself is often credited with the modern resurgence of travel writing in the mid-1970s. We have by now endured every kind of travel tale in every possible locale. The truth is that the genre is almost entirely washed up: just about everything travel-related has been published apart from Bruce Chatwin's laundry bills (and did I hear that Secker & Warburg planned to...? Well, perhaps not).
I am confident, however, of injecting new life into this worn-out genre when I shortly publish my own travel book, The Man Who Stayed Home. Loosely autobiographical, this is a unique account of one man's self-imposed immobility in a travel-obsessed age. It is a nonjourney out of the soul of darkness. It is a stand against motion. It is a full stop in a global rush. It is a permanent mooring on a fast-flowing river.
The book originated some years ago after a typically distressing visit to Dublin Airport, which with its crowds and its misery now resembles the slums of Calcutta. Or so I am told by someone foolish enough to have travelled there. Fortunately, I was merely seeing somebody off, but that experience was quite harrowing enough. The unique non-travelogue was conceived on the journey home - which I decided in a moment of epiphany would be my very last journey.
So it has been. Since then, I have not even travelled so far as the corner shop. I have gone nowhere. I have stayed home. That is not to say my book lacks excitement, or glamour, or romance, or danger. It has all of these. It throbs with exotic life, with foreign spice and with dusky damsels. But how can this be, you ask, if the book literally goes nowhere? Is it a mere fiction? Indeed not. It is nearly all guaranteed fact. Apart from the philosophical content, it is an amalgam of the tales of my many visitors, and how and why they have tracked me down. They are the travellers, God help them. They have come from all over the world, entranced by the notion of a man who has chosen never to travel, a man to whom trains and aeroplanes are anathema, to whom maps are pornography, to whom foreign countries are an abomination and to whom movement of any kind is perfectly horrid. In an insane travel-obsessed age, The Man Who Stayed Home is an icon of isolation, a beacon for the bewildered, a lighthouse for the lost.
I will be flogging the book all next week and you would do well to order your copy now.
Right. No doubt you read last week of the "overkill" operation by the London police on May Day, when they arrested scores of supposedly innocent people in their efforts to contain possible rioting. One City accountant has since complained in court that he was arrested "merely" because he was on his way to a fancy dress party dressed as General Custer. This fellow was wearing blue military trousers with a stripe down the side, a cowboy hat and a buckskin jacket.
Congratulations to the police, I say. In these occasional generalised swoops on the populace by the coppers, it is inevitable that the odd innocent person will suffer, but few of us stop to think of how many dubious types, who would otherwise evade detection, are fortunately arrested.
Among them must be the sort of people who walk the streets in fancy dress in mid-afternoon, people possibly planning bank robberies and muggings, workers supposedly on sick leave, people throwing money away on unnecessary High Street goods, spendthrift wives disposing of their husbands' hard-earned money, street "entertainers", mitching schoolchildren, and various religious freaks, junkies, adulterers, vagrants, drunks and burglars who would otherwise be up to their usual antisocial carry-on. Even if removed from the streets and incarcerated for only a few hours, their absence markedly improves society.
bglacken@irish-times.ie