I didn't much like Joseph Conrad's novels when I first tried to read them at university. They're long, and dense, and because it takes him so many words to tell you what's going on, his work isn't really conducive to reading four novels and writing an essay about them in the space of three days.
I decided to give him another chance, and read Lord Jim in Borneo. For such a long book, it has a very simple plot. At the turn of the twentieth century, Jim is part of the crew of a ship full of Muslim pilgrims. The ship is holed, and believing it will sink and all on board are beyond rescue, he abandons ship. The ship is saved by a passing vessel and Jim is put on trial. Unable to bear the disgrace, he accepts a post on the island of Patusan, and finds redemption. Many people believe that the fictitious island is actually Borneo, and that Jim is based on James Brooke, an Englishman who became Rajah of Sarawak in 1841.
When I stopped trying to read Conrad for the plot, and took time over his discursive way of saying things, I realised that his descriptions of "the Eastern sea and sky" are beautiful. From "the blue peaks inland to the white ribbon of surf on the coast", he expresses what this place is like far better than I ever could.
Our encounter with the sea was much less dramatic than Jim's. Tammie and I met in Kota Kinabalu, and from there we flew to Tawau and went to Mabul island, off the east coast. We went on a whim, deciding that it might be fun to try scuba diving, completely unaware that it's one of the top ten best places to dive in the world. We also inadvertently found ourselves staying in a pretty chalet by the beach and spending the evenings, to steal Conrad's words, "on a verandah draped in motionless foliage and crowned with flowers, in the deep dusk speckled by fiery cigar ends."
Learning to dive was hard work - I knew that something had gone horribly wrong with my trip when I found myself taking an exam on Day Three - but brilliant. There were no disasters at sea: our most perilous moment was when Tammie didn't notice the turtle swimming directly for her head and I, being a bad diving buddy, was too far away to point it out and had to wait for it to startle her, trying not to giggle underwater.
***
Jim goes to Patusan as an employee of Mr Stein, a European naturalist who, when discussing what can be done with Jim, ponders the nature of man's desire to conquer the world:
"Sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him; for if not, why should he want all the place? Why should he run about here and there making a very great noise about himself?"
There is one thing I now know for sure. There is no place for the Irish in the jungle.
From Mabul, we went north to Sandakan, and spent two nights at Uncle Tan's Jungle Camp on the Kinabatangan river. Throughout Lord Jim, a number of people refer to Jim's posting in Patusan as a terrible punishment. By midday on our only full day in the jungle, I was beginning to understand why. It was *hot*. And very humid. After many layers of suncream, multiple paranoid applications of bug repellent and a river water bucket shower, we weren't quite "beplastered with filth out of all semblance of a human being", as Jim is on his first trip into the jungle, but we felt pretty close.
So why would you go? Westerners have historically been drawn to "the East" not just for the adventure of a strange land, but for what they can take from it. On this lust for resources, Conrad points out that
"for a bag of pepper they would cut each others throats without hesitation, and would forswear their souls, of which they were so careful otherwise: the bizarre obstinacy of that desire made them defy death in a thousand shapes - the unknown seas, the loathsome and strange diseases; wounds, captivity, hunger, pestilence and despair."
Jim's redemption comes from finding his place in a community, and the love of his wife, who he calls Jewel, in Patusan. But those already there are convinced that he only stays because he's found some great material treasure; they assume the jewel is real. You can see the volume of resources still being taken out of Borneo as you drive past plantation after plantation of trees planted in perfect rows. Our jungle guide told us that they now mainly produce palm oil, which is highly unsustainable, but as it seems to be in so many of the things I eat, and as my life wouldn't be complete without daily doses of tea and chocolate, other key exports, I don't feel like I'm in a position to be morally outraged...
We went in search of different riches of the jungle. We spotted the elusive orang utan. We watched gibbons swing between trees and sat underneath a proboscis monkey tucking into his dinner in a tree. We seriously considered taking up ornithology as an extracurricular activity after watching eagles and kingfishers. We saw a monitor lizard lumber along the river bank, like a prehistoric creature clambering out of the primordial ooze. We drew the line at going into the jungle in the dark to be eaten by mosquitoes in search of snakes and frogs. We crashed a Norweigan couple's river cruise and looked for owls and crocodiles instead.
This is why you go to the jungle, so you can see
"Nature - the balance of colossal forces. Every star is so - and every blade of grass stands so - and the mighty Kosmos in perfect equilibrium produces - this. This wonder; this masterpiece of Nature- the great artist."
A twilight trip on "the shining sinuousity of the river like an immense letter S of beaten silver" made the hateful day of heat worthwhile. After "the sun, whose concentrated glare dwarfs the earth into a restless mote of dust, had sunk behind the forest... the diffused light from an opal sky seemed to cast upon the world without shadows and without brilliance the illusion of a calm and pensive greatness."
***
With two nights in the jungle behind us, we returned to civilisation in Sandakan. And promptly checked into a rather nice hotel. Don't judge us too harshly, I'm a beginner backpacker.
***
Conrad, Joseph, Lord Jim (1917)
Friday 29 March 2013
Sunday 17 March 2013
An Extended Prelude
My ridiculous itinerary involves a lot of time on aeroplanes, so I thought it would be fitting to include some books about airports on my list. As it turned out, my first day provided ample time for airport reading and musing, with a six-hour delay at Heathrow leading to a missed connection at Kuala Lumpur. Lucky me.
There are two key problems with books about flying. One: books revolving around aeroplanes and airports tend to focus on their potential as settings for disaster. Not something I particularly want to think about. Two: when nothing is going terribly badly wrong, airports are pretty dull.Nevertheless, I pressed on, and read two books the main purpose of which was to convince me that airports are valuable, interesting places to spend extended amounts of time.
The first was The Textual Life of Airports by Christopher Schaberg. This is a book about "the common stories of airports that circulate in everyday life, and about the secret stories of airports - the disturbing, uncomfortable, or smoothed over tales that lie just beneath the surface of these sites." A noble exercise, but his thesis is a bit confused, and by the end of the book I still wasn't quite sure what he was trying to get at.
On the other hand, A Week at the Airport, by Alain de Botton is a beautiful ode to the airport, taking us from departures to arrivals in a lovely narrative arc. While Schaberg always wants to complicate the airport, adding layers and layers of meaning we didn't (want to) know existed, De Botton points out the simple humanity of the airport that is right in front of us, if only we'd look for it.
Schaberg starts from the position that the airport is a 'non-place' of 'super modernity', where identities are troubled and politicised. In contrast, De Botton is keen to stress that who we are when we're travelling is inseparable from who we are the rest of the time. He illustrates this through the anecdote of an office worker who has been dreaming of his family holiday for months, but has a fight with his wife the night before, and is forced into the "unexpected and troubling realisation: that he was bringing *himself* with him on his holiday." This messes with the idea of the 'gap yah' as a time when you go off to 'find yourself'; as it turns out, you've been there all the time, whether you like it or not.
Schaberg spends a lot of time on the double identity of airports as a place for those on holiday and as a place of work. There are so many layers of everyday activity that go on with passengers barely noticing, until something goes wrong. Like a six hour delay, for example. As I waited in the very long check-in queue with the ranty passengers, I couldn't help feeling sorry for the ground staff; it must be difficult to arrive at work, see that a service is delayed, and know that you're going to spend a considerable portion of your day being yelled at. Spending a week living at the airport, De Botton gets to see the other side of the airport too, and makes this very sensible point on staff-passenger relations:
"However skilfully designed it's incentive structure, the airline could in the end do very little to guarantee that its staff would actually add to their dealings with customers that almost imperceptible measure of good will which elevates service from mere efficiency to tangible warmth... The real origins of these qualities lay... in the loving atmosphere that reigned in a house in Cheshire, where two parents had brought up a future staff member with benevolence and good humour..."
Schaberg points out that the 'textuality' of airports expressed in signs and written instructions codifies the space, making acceptable and appropriate behaviour obvious to all. Which makes the airport sound like a temple of beautiful order, until you miss your connecting flight because you spent five minutes running around a circular terminal following signs for a transfers counter that never materialised. Signs pointing to the trees in the middle of said circular terminal are of no help to me, Kuala Lumpur International.
A lengthy delay also takes the shine off the dream of flying that De Botton is keen to recover; the idea of the airport as a gateway to luxurious "hours in the air free from encumbrance, [feeling] spurred on to formulate hopeful plans for the future by the views of coasts and forests below." At this point you become acutely aware of the fact that De Botton's patron is the airport authority, and the dream he's talking about is the one they're always trying to sell us. Sitting on a hard bench with a very numb bum, I'm struggling to value the airline for "its ability to stir the soul."
But waiting for what De Botton describes as the airport's "emotional climax" makes it a bit more bearable. He very poignantly expresses one of the truly great joys of travelling a long way:
"There is no one, however lonely or isolated, however pessimistic about the human race... who does not in the end expect that someone significant will come to say hello at arrivals... Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be very busy... it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us (as someone must have done for us when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would never have made it this far)."
And Tammie was there to meet me at the other end.
***
Botton, Alain, A Week at the Airport (2009)
Schaberg, Christopher The Textual Life of Airports (2012)
There are two key problems with books about flying. One: books revolving around aeroplanes and airports tend to focus on their potential as settings for disaster. Not something I particularly want to think about. Two: when nothing is going terribly badly wrong, airports are pretty dull.Nevertheless, I pressed on, and read two books the main purpose of which was to convince me that airports are valuable, interesting places to spend extended amounts of time.
The first was The Textual Life of Airports by Christopher Schaberg. This is a book about "the common stories of airports that circulate in everyday life, and about the secret stories of airports - the disturbing, uncomfortable, or smoothed over tales that lie just beneath the surface of these sites." A noble exercise, but his thesis is a bit confused, and by the end of the book I still wasn't quite sure what he was trying to get at.
On the other hand, A Week at the Airport, by Alain de Botton is a beautiful ode to the airport, taking us from departures to arrivals in a lovely narrative arc. While Schaberg always wants to complicate the airport, adding layers and layers of meaning we didn't (want to) know existed, De Botton points out the simple humanity of the airport that is right in front of us, if only we'd look for it.
Schaberg starts from the position that the airport is a 'non-place' of 'super modernity', where identities are troubled and politicised. In contrast, De Botton is keen to stress that who we are when we're travelling is inseparable from who we are the rest of the time. He illustrates this through the anecdote of an office worker who has been dreaming of his family holiday for months, but has a fight with his wife the night before, and is forced into the "unexpected and troubling realisation: that he was bringing *himself* with him on his holiday." This messes with the idea of the 'gap yah' as a time when you go off to 'find yourself'; as it turns out, you've been there all the time, whether you like it or not.
Schaberg spends a lot of time on the double identity of airports as a place for those on holiday and as a place of work. There are so many layers of everyday activity that go on with passengers barely noticing, until something goes wrong. Like a six hour delay, for example. As I waited in the very long check-in queue with the ranty passengers, I couldn't help feeling sorry for the ground staff; it must be difficult to arrive at work, see that a service is delayed, and know that you're going to spend a considerable portion of your day being yelled at. Spending a week living at the airport, De Botton gets to see the other side of the airport too, and makes this very sensible point on staff-passenger relations:
"However skilfully designed it's incentive structure, the airline could in the end do very little to guarantee that its staff would actually add to their dealings with customers that almost imperceptible measure of good will which elevates service from mere efficiency to tangible warmth... The real origins of these qualities lay... in the loving atmosphere that reigned in a house in Cheshire, where two parents had brought up a future staff member with benevolence and good humour..."
Schaberg points out that the 'textuality' of airports expressed in signs and written instructions codifies the space, making acceptable and appropriate behaviour obvious to all. Which makes the airport sound like a temple of beautiful order, until you miss your connecting flight because you spent five minutes running around a circular terminal following signs for a transfers counter that never materialised. Signs pointing to the trees in the middle of said circular terminal are of no help to me, Kuala Lumpur International.
A lengthy delay also takes the shine off the dream of flying that De Botton is keen to recover; the idea of the airport as a gateway to luxurious "hours in the air free from encumbrance, [feeling] spurred on to formulate hopeful plans for the future by the views of coasts and forests below." At this point you become acutely aware of the fact that De Botton's patron is the airport authority, and the dream he's talking about is the one they're always trying to sell us. Sitting on a hard bench with a very numb bum, I'm struggling to value the airline for "its ability to stir the soul."
But waiting for what De Botton describes as the airport's "emotional climax" makes it a bit more bearable. He very poignantly expresses one of the truly great joys of travelling a long way:
"There is no one, however lonely or isolated, however pessimistic about the human race... who does not in the end expect that someone significant will come to say hello at arrivals... Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be very busy... it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us (as someone must have done for us when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would never have made it this far)."
And Tammie was there to meet me at the other end.
***
Botton, Alain, A Week at the Airport (2009)
Schaberg, Christopher The Textual Life of Airports (2012)
Wednesday 13 March 2013
Preliminaries
This blog was inspired by Dan Kieran’s The Idle Traveller. Dan is an advocate of ‘slow travel’, the idea that a trip shouldn’t be just about arriving somewhere, doing the ‘must-see’ things and then getting on the plane back home, having ‘done’ another country on your bucket list. Instead, he talks about going to fewer places, by slower means of transport, and really getting to grips with them, taking your time to absorb the strangeness of new places.
In planning my own trip, I have completely failed to follow his advice on many counts (see ridiculous itinerary below), but I was really enthused by his idea that you can gain deeper insight into a strange country by putting down the Lonely Planet – with its “boxes for you to tick and to-do lists that you already know you won’t get around to” - and using novels and biographies as your travel guides.
This appealed to me for two reasons. One, as those of you who know me well will have realised, I love a project. The romantic ideal of aimless wandering in wide-open spaces for four months makes me nervous. Turning the trip into a project with goals and an end product is much more appealing. I’m sure my inner free-wheeling, no-plan-making hippie will be released the moment I touch down in Borneo, but for now I’m going armed with a reading list and that makes me pretty happy.
The second reason is that this trip marks the end of my three-year career in publishing. I got into publishing in the first place when a fit of pre-Finals, ‘what am I going to do with my life’ fear led to applying for an publishing MA, and sheer good luck led to being offered my first job soon after, when I hadn’t really had a chance to think it through. My reasons for leaving publishing - in what I like to tell myself is a ‘strategic career switch’ - are many and difficult to articulate. But a byproduct of the last three years is that my love of books has been slightly dented. While it’s amazing to love what you do, and do what you love, there’s something to be said for not knowing what goes on behind the scenes. So I’m going to read my way around South-East Asia, and some of the Indian subcontinent and Australia, and attempt to piece my experiences and the books together in this blog. And hopefully remember why I loved books in the first place in the process.
***
The Plan
For those of you interested in where I might be at any given time, the current plan is this:
16th March – 13th April: Borneo, Singapore and pensinsular Malaysia
13th April – 3rd May: Nepal
3rd May – 18th May: India
18th May – 28th June: Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam
28th June – 20th July: Australia, via Hong Kong
21st July: back in London town
If you’ve read any books set in any of these places (and that are available on Kindle!) send them my way.
Thanks for reading, and hope you enjoy!
PS. If my blog turns into a complete disaster, feel free to divert your attention to Freckles from Foreign Lands by the wonderful Tamara Dyer, which is well worth a read.
***
Kieran, Dan The Idle Traveller: The Art of Slow Travel (2012)
In planning my own trip, I have completely failed to follow his advice on many counts (see ridiculous itinerary below), but I was really enthused by his idea that you can gain deeper insight into a strange country by putting down the Lonely Planet – with its “boxes for you to tick and to-do lists that you already know you won’t get around to” - and using novels and biographies as your travel guides.
This appealed to me for two reasons. One, as those of you who know me well will have realised, I love a project. The romantic ideal of aimless wandering in wide-open spaces for four months makes me nervous. Turning the trip into a project with goals and an end product is much more appealing. I’m sure my inner free-wheeling, no-plan-making hippie will be released the moment I touch down in Borneo, but for now I’m going armed with a reading list and that makes me pretty happy.
The second reason is that this trip marks the end of my three-year career in publishing. I got into publishing in the first place when a fit of pre-Finals, ‘what am I going to do with my life’ fear led to applying for an publishing MA, and sheer good luck led to being offered my first job soon after, when I hadn’t really had a chance to think it through. My reasons for leaving publishing - in what I like to tell myself is a ‘strategic career switch’ - are many and difficult to articulate. But a byproduct of the last three years is that my love of books has been slightly dented. While it’s amazing to love what you do, and do what you love, there’s something to be said for not knowing what goes on behind the scenes. So I’m going to read my way around South-East Asia, and some of the Indian subcontinent and Australia, and attempt to piece my experiences and the books together in this blog. And hopefully remember why I loved books in the first place in the process.
***
The Plan
For those of you interested in where I might be at any given time, the current plan is this:
16th March – 13th April: Borneo, Singapore and pensinsular Malaysia
13th April – 3rd May: Nepal
3rd May – 18th May: India
18th May – 28th June: Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam
28th June – 20th July: Australia, via Hong Kong
21st July: back in London town
If you’ve read any books set in any of these places (and that are available on Kindle!) send them my way.
Thanks for reading, and hope you enjoy!
PS. If my blog turns into a complete disaster, feel free to divert your attention to Freckles from Foreign Lands by the wonderful Tamara Dyer, which is well worth a read.
***
Kieran, Dan The Idle Traveller: The Art of Slow Travel (2012)
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