Tales of a travel addict
THE PROPHETS promise that light will shine in our moments of greatest despair and I got to experience this recently after bewailing and ochóning the state of travel literature in Ireland. I genuinely thought the genre was moribund and then, lo, from the heavens appeared Irish Pages, a literary journal based in Belfast which for me was like the Apostles’ Creed, reaffirming my belief and I am born again. This biannual journal of contemporary writing features fiction, poetry, non-fiction and photography. It makes no claims to champion travel writing, yet each of the last few editions has travel pieces that rival those rare brilliant editions of Granta devoted to the genre.
Here, first is Harry Clifton nailing in five sculpted sentences the quintessence of Paris: “Alone, I lunch in a crowded café on the Boulevard Sebastopol. Locals queue for lotto tickets and cigarettes. Widows and widowers sit at their regular seats.
“A bald waiter with his tie unloosed, for this is not a fine establishment, takes orders – a steak frites here, an omelette aux herbes there . . . Odours of cooking, the pink blush of a kir. And the level hum of common humanity conversing with itself.
“The idyll, the essence of this city. The absolutely ordinary, raised to the power of a sacrament.” Halleluiah.
Then came Tony MacMahon’s A Café in Tangiers, in which the accordionist remembers heading to Morocco in 1967 with a tent and primus stove and watching turbaned men “drinking mint tea of the deepest green, smoking hashish in deep draws out of long, slender-stemmed clay pipes”, and how, when they emptied “the knob of glowing dope-ash” from their pipes, it reminded him of calculating “range, elevation and wind direction before calling a fire-order for an 88mm mortar-gun”. There’s a revelatory quality to good travel writing and MacMahon’s moment came upon realising that the “lonesome notes in hoarse, guttural Arabic” and “the oud belting out music from a musical heaven . . . was not a foreign music, it was my own music, every bit as much mine as the music I had heard from the travellers Dunne, from the strange cadences of Tommy Potts’ fiddle, from the haunting airs of pipers in Ireland. It was as if light had gone on over the dark road of my life.”
Gerard McCarthy’s Home From Andalucía, describes the experience of loitering in the Grand Mosque in Córdoba as, “imbibing its balanced stillness”. He writes of watching a municipal worker “sweeping his ritual round”, and hears “music that one might wear a suit to dance to”. These simple sentences of stone-wall solidity capture everything, by saying very little, and like a director combining intimate close-ups with sweeping wide-angle shots he shifts focus suddenly and “the scene in its entirety was hidden behind the crowds”.
Denis Sampson in Reflections on Attachment writes about how Inis Oírr was his first experience of a foreign country, at age 10; the first time he felt that sense of attachment and estrangement that we all feel abroad. “I was in a foreign country, experiencing for the first time another language and another culture, but in many ways, it was only a backdrop to other things” . . . a preparation for “the foreign country of adolescence”. Rodge Glass’s 59 places to Fuck in Arizona is a short story which provides at least some of the travel information promised in the title, while Manus Charleton’s From Landscape Road to Chauvet Cave captures a south suburban Dublin with a liminality that has dark, feral aspects and, possibly even, boars emerging from the soil.
All are fine examples of what travel writing can achieve when sculpted with care, and it’s great to see that Irish men are finally returning to the genre, having been scared off, perhaps, by the sheer eminence of Dervla Murphy in the past.
[ irishpages.org ]