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Book Reviews

Travel has never been easy. Appropriately enough, the word itself comes from travail; its original meaning (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) was “labour, toil; suffering, trouble; labour of child-birth, etc.” Only after the stress eventually moved to the first syllable did “travel” become restricted to the sense of journey, although it seems never to have shed its embedded, first connotations. Labor indeed is involved: it takes something to work your way around an unfamiliar city, region, country, or continent – whether by bus, train, boat, plane, or on foot – and anyone who has ever done so, lugging around cultural as well as actual baggage, finding (or not) accommodation, adjusting (or not) to different climates and ways of being, knows that. They also know that suffering and trouble can come in numerous guises, all of which spell misery: illness and disease; bad food or, worse, no food; untreated water; wretched lodgings; poisonous snakes and scorpions, malarial mosquitoes, and mad dogs; inclement weather; missed connections or no connections at all; thievery and thuggery, transportation strikes, communications breakdowns; political unrest and upheavals, terrorism. Those bitten by the travel bug always press on anyway, grunts for hardship and risk.

The allure of travel has always had something to do, I suspect, with travail’s third meaning, i.e., “labour of child-birth.” The person who travels leaves behind the most essential part of life that defines most of us – the familiar, the sedentary, the homes that stand in for wombs – in order to experience some stage of passage, which often means being caught up in what is sometimes a painful process of passing from one world to another. In sometimes profound ways, no traveler ever comes back from a journey exactly the same person (or, at least, shouldn’t), for if the journey hasn’t exactly led to the traveler’s rebirth, it has at least allowed humankind – or a part of it – to be glimpsed and beheld anew.

The reasons for traveling are as varied as travelers themselves. Varied, too, are the accounts of their wanderings. The best contemporary travel writers, to my mind, are a diverse bunch, and a few of them would not even consider themselves “travel writers.” But they share in common, in recounting their journeys, the power to astonish, both because of their insights into their sometimes humorous, often heartrending, sometimes dangerous, often frustrating and, more times than not, abject experiences, and because of their capacity for compassion. By the latter I mean a way of never demeaning the Other by letting go of their own humanity, and so stripping other human beings of theirs – despite stupid or vicious border guards, corrupt police, or incompetent, unctuous, and officious bureaucrats, despite cloying panhandlers or sleazy conmen – even when disbelief, disdain (by which I do not mean ridicule), or horror might be the only reasonable reaction a traveler can have to a particular situation at that exact moment. Compassion is a tall order, but one that’s essential if the truth isn’t to be obscured.

And the truth always comes through in the telling. The first truth always has to do with why the traveler is on the road. Ryszard Kapuscinski went to Africa as a journalist and, in covering revolution after revolution, lost his heart to the continent as he tried to make sense of it (The Emperor, Another Day of Life, The Shadow of the Sun); he was also posted to Latin America (The Soccer War) and Iran (Shah of Shahs), and the world of travel literature is the better for this. His Imperium, which covers his journey for more personal reasons through the former Soviet Union to the ends of the gulag at Kolyma, is one of the great travel meditations on human nature in all its destructiveness, in all its resilience. Bruce Chatwin, who traveled in search of himself and to be himself – fair enough – in What Am I Doing Here and In Patagonia, believed in the primal, and perhaps curative, powers of solitary trekking; he touched a chord among many travel readers and travelers alike by illuminating – despite occasionally falling maddeningly short of – his parallel inner journeys. Jon Krakauer, whose Into the Wild is one the finest studies of the vagaries of solitude and lonesomeness, retraced the steps of someone he felt was very much like himself, who had perished after backpacking into and going it alone in the Alaskan wilderness. William Least Heat-Moon left everything behind because he’d lost his job and his marriage; blue highways, his account of traveling through the small and often derelict and sometimes abandoned towns off America’s secondary roads, is a moving insight into a way of life now vanished (as well as a confession that travel might not solve anything).

Tony Perrottet decided to travel to the Mediterranean for two reasons, which happened to coincide fortuitously at a certain point in his life: he’d discovered references to Agrippa’s Map, which charted the roadway-connected sprawl of the Roman empire and hung (“as large as a drive-in movie screen,” he writes) in Rome’s Vipsania Colonnade some 2,000 years ago, and learned that his partner Lesley was pregnant. Researching and bearing in mind ancient Roman tourism while traveling the same routes about the Mediterranean as a modern, Perrottet decided, might reveal that it was possible “to explore the Med in a way that was vaguely original.” No terror or squalor being Lesley’s and her obstetrician’s travel conditions, the Mediterranean fit the bill for their last journey together as a twosome; and so they set off to places Perrottet had theretofore avoided, having instead wandered about the likes of Tierra del Fuego, Iceland, Zanzibar, Pago Pago, the Amazon, Tanzania, and other places as distant – and far off the beaten tourist track.

Part of Route 66 A.D. proves Perrottet’s hunch, for his knowledge of Roman customs, mythology, and history is matched by his familiarity with ancient travelers’ complaints, fears, illnesses, and delights, which provides for unique insights not only into how Romans traveled but also into what the sites – most of which today no Roman would recognize, having been ravaged by natural forces such as earthquakes and the more destructive forces of Christian zealotry – meant to travelers some 2,000 years ago. The empire was Rome’s, and it was vast; it contained Rome’s own mythological origins (founded, it was believed, by descendants of Troy), its religious roots (in the Greek gods), and the Seven Wonders of the World (“the pillars,” Perrottet writes, “of their own culture”). The Pax Romana made the empire’s tourist road-travel safe, and there was an astounding number of seafaring routes to take the wealthy or aristocratic from land’s end to land’s end, where the roads continued. Villas in resorts were rented along the way, athletic competitions (especially at Olympia) drew both spectators and participants, sacrifices were made at temples, oracles were consulted, long-lost sites (among them, Troy) were scrambled over. Hostelries providing beds and food lay 25 miles (about a day’s journey by wagon) apart on the Roman highways, and, at major tourist attractions and resorts (then as today), more luxurious accommodations existed, as did the first mass-produced souvenirs and pesky, professional tour guides.

Some Roman travelers, like their modern counterparts, traveled with guidebook in hand and recorded their journeys, and Perrottet is broadly familiar with their verse, “novels,” poetry, letters, reports, and journals. Route 66 A.D. splices together, very cleverly, the Roman travel experience with Perrottet’s; and what is in actuality two books reads easily as one. The problem is, the Romans’ experience constantly proves the more interesting; and I think this is because they, in their writings, never entertained the notion of the exotic. Romans may have suffered from heat and cold, bedbug-infested inns, tasteless and monotonous meals, pustules and boils, souvenir hawkers, hustling guides, wrecked schedules, debt, traffic accidents, the insults of drunk sailors and muleteers, sinking ships, and illnesses never identified (and some never cured), but the world they traveled through was a world they, in fact, ruled. Its peoples were their subjects, and subjects – no matter their different customs or appearances – are always familiar. Indeed, there is not one passage, one quote, from the ancients in Route 66 A.D. that depicts the empire’s inhabitants as alien, as curiously Other, while Perrottet – to the book’s disadvantage – constantly peppers the passages recording his journey with characters that are cartoonish.

Perrottet’s modern Italians, Greeks, Turks, and Egyptians, people not much different from one another and not very much different from us, are tiresomely caricatured as zany, incompetent, surly, scary, or mysterious. In Greece, the country I know best, hoteliers are described as either seedy or crazy (in a hotel in Mani, the owner announces, “I’m a partisan! Boom boom!”); Perrottet meets “ouzo-addled” Greeks in a basement bar in Sparta where a gypsy woman (can it be? must it be?) dances to the tune of hundred-drachma notes slipped into her belt; and two farmers in Arcadia’s Lousios gorge are reinvented as, in Perrottet’s words, “wild men.” They had, he writes (and I groaned):

…frayed handlebar mustaches [that] twitched beneath rosy red cheeks; both wore mud-caked galoshes and suspenders like characters from the Brothers Grimm….They could tell we were half-dead, so they dragged us in from the rain, and boiled water for instant coffee….As always, the grains of Nescafe were portioned out as if they were gold dust….This goofy pair made pretty good custodians of the trail, we decided – like the Spartans, they were obeying the ancient laws of hospitality. According to Homer, you should always be kind to travelers in case they were gods wandering the earth in disguise.

Although this is so pat, so clichéd, it could be passed over if it weren’t for the fact that Perrottet constantly strains to describe almost everything and everyone he encounters in like terms – and when there’s nothing much out of the ordinary, which is much of the time, Perrottet uses snappy, pop references to enhance his descriptions. In Izmir, Turkish women “shuffle by wearing I Dream of Jeannie pantaloons.” A man sitting in the bar of Cairo’s Windsor Hotel looks to Perrottet “like a cross between Klaus Barbie and Nosferatu.”

He sat in the same corner every night with his bodyguard, always in silence, smoking black cigarettes – more accurately, devouring them. Every time he inhaled, his cheeks disappeared into his jaw, turning his head into a hollow skull….His guard – a sweating boulder of flesh – attended to his every need. He lit his cigarettes and mixed his drinks. I imagined him muttering in a Peter Lorre voice: “Can I get you anything, master? Perhaps a little something for myself? You’re comfortable, I hope?”

It’s a style that grates more than charms. It can be hyperbolic. And it doesn’t work most of the time, especially when Perrottet strains to compare the ancients themselves to moderns by making a mockery of the differences between their world and ours. The bridges he creates to link them rest upon the worst kind of historical and political simplification for support. For instance, he writes:

The Spartans have been awarded the prize as the testosterone-fueled fascists of ancient history. Mortal enemies of the artsy, philosophy-loving Athenians, they ran a sadistic, totalitarian regime throughout the classical age, whose heartless social code was geared exclusively to creating invincible armies….This inhuman system, where mindless discipline was elevated to a religious principle, was much admired by European thinkers in the eighteenth century, but ever since the Romantic era the Spartans have been disdained as philistine lowlifes – antiquity’s sullen skinheads. It’s not surprising to learn that the Nazis adored them, celebrating Sparta as the most “Nordic” state in Greece….[Hitler] saw the staunch, fight-to-the-death spirit of the battle of Thermopylae in Stalingrad, and even declared the peasant soup of the German province Schleswig-Holstein was descended from Spartan broth.

Literary slapstick – the only term I can think of for this descriptive device – abounds in modern travelogues, and Perrottet probably is not guilty of anything more than trying to amuse his readers by making both his personal experiences and history accessible in this way; and he’s as good at it as any. Somewhere along the line, however, his attempt to meld the experiences of ancient travelers with his contemporary tracing of their route suffers, for whatever compassion he has (and I think quite a lot, given his frequently sensitive reading of ancient travel texts), as well as that passion that drives him to retrace their steps (even when this means diving into sewage-polluted waters), is lost to an incomprehensible dictate to make the book a-laugh-a-minute. The loss is ours, as readers.

The best travel writers beg, always, to be reread – not as guides, but as writers of human experience. Perrottet’s greatest achievement in Route 66 A.D. is neither as a guide nor as a writer of human experience, but as an expansive researcher whose ancient sources scream out to be read firsthand. This book – despite its shortcomings, despite those factual mistakes that are editorially unforgivable (Athens does not have a population of 10 million!), and despite the fact that this is not Perrottet’s intention – is a sterling introduction to those sources. There’s no doubt that the reader will be enlightened as to the nature of Roman tourist travel and fascinated by Perrottet’s descriptions of Roman life, in cities and on the road; one might also appreciate, perhaps for the first time, the importance Romans attached to those Mediterranean sites still drawing tourist crowds today. It’s dubious, however, that Route 66 A.D. will warrant a second read. Some things, after all, are once-in-a-lifetime experiences – for better or worse.