MAGAN'S WORLD:HOW DO YOU deal with the fictionalisation that is sneaking into travel literature? I'm hoping I'll have come up with an answer by the time I begin a travel-writing workshop at West Cork Literary Festival on Monday.
Since the time of Marco Polo travel writers have been accused of blurring the line between fact and fiction. I certainly have been guilty of it in my books. To form a single narrative from the dissociated strands of a journey requires a certain degree of manipulation, otherwise the book would just be endless airport delays, hotel check-in mix-ups and tiresome squabbles on bus journeys.
Among the travel-writing pantheon of the 1970s and 1980s, which included Paul Theroux, Jonathan Raban and Colin Thubron, Bruce Chatwin was the least constrained by factual accuracy. He mixed the contents of his notebooks with flares of imagination to create flamboyant narratives that offered, in my opinion, a richer sense of a journey than factual accuracy could ever convey.
Thubron has come out against this trend, yet he seems hardly guiltless unless he expects us to believe that every time he walks into a remote cafe he happens to come across the most eloquent and informed speaker on whatever issue is occupying him.
Being a mongrel mix of memoir, history, anthropology, geography and adventure story, travel writing has never had much literary status. Thubron remarked that “travel writing is relegated to something people do in the gap between adolescence and maturity”, and Theroux recalls that before turning to travel writing he found the genre “a bore” written and read by “bores”.
At least travel writers are held in higher esteem than the other group with which I identify myself, travel journalists. Within journalism we are regarded as little higher than the tabloids’ 3am Girls, as if we were tourists with typewriters. A conference in the US called us “journalism’s tiramisu” – fluffy, soaked in booze and offering little sustenance.
Perhaps my workshop should focus more on the power and potential of travel writing – on the fact that at its best it can be the purest and most potent of literary forms, lacking the pomposity of poetry, the introspection of memoir and the outright contrivance of fiction. It is the only art form that has as its aim to celebrate the world, to bridge cultures and to break down barriers.
Ultimately it is about an individual exploring his or her world, melding aspects of history, anthropology and culture to offer a personal take on who we are. If, as a race, we are to have any chance of survival we are going to have to accept that we are one. The tribalism and parochialism that have defined us throughout our existence need to be set aside, and who better to help us find new connections between strangers than those who have spent their lives exploring what lies beyond their parish?
Perhaps I can seek sanctuary in the vagueness I resorted to in my book on India: “I certainly haven’t gone out of my way to lie, yet sometimes revealing the truth requires blurring the facts just a little – certain elements have been expanded, contracted and embellished. It is hard to pin down any experience, especially an Indian one. Life just isn’t that stable.”
No less a man than Theroux offers some support when he says that travel writing begins in journalism, slides into fiction and ends in autobiography.
** manchan@ireland.com
** West Cork Literary Festival (www.westcorkliteraryfestival. ie), which runs until next weekend, also has workshops with Billy Roach, Ferdia Mac Anna, Martina Devlin, John McKenna and Jack L