Home is behind, the world ahead,
And there are many paths to tread
Through shadows to the edge of night,
Until the stars are all alight.
Then world behind and home ahead,
We'll wander back to home and bed.
***
Trying to pick a book set in London to read on the way home has made me realise the cheek of what I've been trying to do in this blog. Because no random author could capture London the way I see it.
One of the reasons people travel is to expand their horizons, to see life lived in ways very different to their own, to learn that the world is a vast place and they are only one small person living in one small patch of it. All of this is true, and all of it is good to learn.
But after four months away from home, I've been wondering how much you can really learn about the world as a tourist. In India, I downloaded the complete works of Rudyard Kiping, and it came with some interesting essays on his work. One that has stuck with me is by GK Chesterton. Unlike other readers of Kipling, he wasn't that impressed with the exotic nature of Kipling's work, pointing out that
"the globe trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. He is always breathing an air of locality... The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men... The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men... Mr Kipling, with all his merits, is a globe trotter; he has not the patience to become part of anything."
Chesterton argues that travel does not make the world bigger, but smaller. He suggests that the only way to understand some of the greatest things in life is to look for them with a microscope, not a telescope; not as "tourists or inquirers" but "with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets".
There are important practical, moral and spiritual lessons to learn as a stranger. I've noticed incredible things that people who have lived in a place their whole lives no longer see. I've realised that I'm often more vulnerable than I'd like to think, and noticed how often I have to rely on the goodwill and understanding of others who don't even know me. I've had time to think about the experience of exile and separation, and what Christianity says about it and how it can impact my faith.
But now I want to go where I'm known. I want to have "the patience to be part of something", to commit to and invest in my community in its various forms. I want to help plan my sister's wedding, discuss all the books I've been reading with my mum, and beg my dad's help with my scary upcoming business exams. I want to see the clock tower at King's Cross, the fairy lights on the South Bank, and my own front door.
So I haven't read any books set in London. Because I don't just want a snapshot of it.
Instead, I'll finish by stealing from Tolkien again. There is a great scene in The Lord of the Rings where Frodo thinks about going home, and how much he wants to see Bilbo. And I feel exactly as he does: dear friends, "I would rather see [you] than all the towers and palaces in the world".
***
Oh, and it turns out I really do love books.
Friday 19 July 2013
Thursday 18 July 2013
"And all the land beneath our feet would be our own": Australia
The opening pages of My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin insist that it is an Australian tale; not a romance, nor a novel but "simply a yarn - a real yarn". On its publication in 1901, Henry Lawson, another Australian author, described it as "born of the bush" and a book "true to Australia - the truest I ever read."
On first reading, however, there doesn't seem to be much to set it apart from the nineteenth century English classics. Despite declaring that she is "only a common little bush girl", Sybylla Melvin, the young protagonist and narrator, seems as though she would fit right in with the headstrong yet sympathetic heroines of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters.
In the same way, when I arrived in Australia it immediately felt very familiar. Constrained by time and getting tired, I've stuck mainly to the major cities, and with the "weird witchery of the mighty bush" hidden underneath concrete and behind tall buildings, it's hard to believe that I'm geographically further from home than I've ever been. When you can get a decent cup of tea, you feel you must be close to home.
As My Brilliant Career progresses, however, you start to realise that Sybylla is no typical heroine. Lizzy Bennett was never called upon to help put out a bush fire. Jane Eyre never lifted a cow. And when Harold Beecham - "a tall grand man, and honest and true and rich" - proposes and the time comes for Sybylla to put aside her notions of independence and get married, she cracks him across the face with a whip. Sybylla is a "child of the mighty bush" and she will not be tamed.
Similarly, despite all the home comforts, there is much about Australia that is weird and wonderful. I've been scuba diving with a fish almost as big as I am, and with sharks much bigger (and fortunately much further away). I've petted kangaroos and koalas, and been creeped out by enormous snakes and crocodiles behind glass at the zoo. After about ten minutes at Bondi beach, sipping flat whites in the sunshine and watching surfers drift in the waves, I understood completely why my two cousins have forsaken Northern Ireland to live here instead.
***
The problem with Australia feeling so familiar, and with it being my last stop after so many weeks on the move, is that at times it's made me desperately homesick. In many ways, that's appropriate for a visit here, a land largely built by people from somewhere else. I feel homesick for England and Ireland because so many people here before me have been too, and have created Australia in the image of the homes they left behind.
Longing for home is an overarching theme of Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, a fictionalised autobiography of Ned Kelly, the notorious Australian outlaw. Kelly comes from an Irish peasant family, his "brave parents... ripped from Ireland like teeth from the mouth of their own history" leaving "every dear familiar thing... abandoned on the docks". Although the novel covers his criminal exploits, it makes it clear that his motivation is always his desire to restore his family and fulfil their dreams of creating a stable home for themselves, to possess land they "could walk on from breakfast until [they] saw the last kookaburra marking its boundary across the evening sky". But, sent away at thirteen and never really able to return, Ned remains a "boy without a home", moving from place to place, from hidden den to hidden den, never fully attaining the one thing he truly wants; a "place on earth to call his own".
Unlike Kelly, I've been in self-imposed exile. It's been my choice to roam, to go walkabout, to see radically different things and do things I wouldn't usually do. It's been amazing. But it takes its toll. And though I'm now in fairly familiar surroundings, with friends and family, and most of the home comforts I'd been craving, I've realised that there's nothing quite like being in a place you can call your own.
I'd like to go home now.
***
Carey, Peter, True History of the Kelly Gang (2000)
Franklin, Miles, My Brilliant Career (1901)
On first reading, however, there doesn't seem to be much to set it apart from the nineteenth century English classics. Despite declaring that she is "only a common little bush girl", Sybylla Melvin, the young protagonist and narrator, seems as though she would fit right in with the headstrong yet sympathetic heroines of Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters.
In the same way, when I arrived in Australia it immediately felt very familiar. Constrained by time and getting tired, I've stuck mainly to the major cities, and with the "weird witchery of the mighty bush" hidden underneath concrete and behind tall buildings, it's hard to believe that I'm geographically further from home than I've ever been. When you can get a decent cup of tea, you feel you must be close to home.
As My Brilliant Career progresses, however, you start to realise that Sybylla is no typical heroine. Lizzy Bennett was never called upon to help put out a bush fire. Jane Eyre never lifted a cow. And when Harold Beecham - "a tall grand man, and honest and true and rich" - proposes and the time comes for Sybylla to put aside her notions of independence and get married, she cracks him across the face with a whip. Sybylla is a "child of the mighty bush" and she will not be tamed.
Similarly, despite all the home comforts, there is much about Australia that is weird and wonderful. I've been scuba diving with a fish almost as big as I am, and with sharks much bigger (and fortunately much further away). I've petted kangaroos and koalas, and been creeped out by enormous snakes and crocodiles behind glass at the zoo. After about ten minutes at Bondi beach, sipping flat whites in the sunshine and watching surfers drift in the waves, I understood completely why my two cousins have forsaken Northern Ireland to live here instead.
***
The problem with Australia feeling so familiar, and with it being my last stop after so many weeks on the move, is that at times it's made me desperately homesick. In many ways, that's appropriate for a visit here, a land largely built by people from somewhere else. I feel homesick for England and Ireland because so many people here before me have been too, and have created Australia in the image of the homes they left behind.
Longing for home is an overarching theme of Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, a fictionalised autobiography of Ned Kelly, the notorious Australian outlaw. Kelly comes from an Irish peasant family, his "brave parents... ripped from Ireland like teeth from the mouth of their own history" leaving "every dear familiar thing... abandoned on the docks". Although the novel covers his criminal exploits, it makes it clear that his motivation is always his desire to restore his family and fulfil their dreams of creating a stable home for themselves, to possess land they "could walk on from breakfast until [they] saw the last kookaburra marking its boundary across the evening sky". But, sent away at thirteen and never really able to return, Ned remains a "boy without a home", moving from place to place, from hidden den to hidden den, never fully attaining the one thing he truly wants; a "place on earth to call his own".
Unlike Kelly, I've been in self-imposed exile. It's been my choice to roam, to go walkabout, to see radically different things and do things I wouldn't usually do. It's been amazing. But it takes its toll. And though I'm now in fairly familiar surroundings, with friends and family, and most of the home comforts I'd been craving, I've realised that there's nothing quite like being in a place you can call your own.
I'd like to go home now.
***
Carey, Peter, True History of the Kelly Gang (2000)
Franklin, Miles, My Brilliant Career (1901)
Tuesday 2 July 2013
"Bombs aren't for boys from Boston": Vietnam
There is a certain romance to being in Saigon. Reading Graham Greene's The Quiet American while drinking the best coffee I've ever had, surrounded by the grand colonial architecture of the rue Catinat, I could almost believe I was in the era of the novel, that hey day of the war correspondent armed with his portable typewriter on his exotic, noble mission. But only almost; Saigon is, of course, now Ho Chi Minh City, the rue Catinat is Dong Khoi, and "the girls in white silk trousers bicycl[ing] home" have been replaced by ladies in high heels buzzing along on their scooters. Today, Ho Chi Minh is hectic, noisy, traffic-consumed, and very fun. A few months in Asia has quashed the underlying feeling of being slightly overwhelmed that accompanied me in the first cities I visited, so I spent my time there indulging in two of the great joys of Asian travel: street food and zooming around on the back of a motorbike (all on an organised tour, I'm not that brave).
Meeting people at the airport may be even better than being met yourself. All of the joy, none of the travel. Hannah and Lucy arrived from London to spend two weeks travelling from Ho Chi Minh to Hanoi with me. Travelling solo is great, but you can't beat being ridiculously profound and profoundly ridiculous with good friends on long bus journeys and over cheap cocktails.
***
Our whistle stop journey north began with visits to the War Remnants Museum and the Cu Chi Tunnels, major tourist attractions educating visitors on the "American War". Before I came to Vietnam, I'd assumed that I had a fairly neutral view on the war. It was only when I was faced with naively unexpected, gut-wrenching photographs of American war crimes, and when I watched in horror as the Cu Chi guide proudly demonstrated the grizzly booby traps used on the "enemy" by the Viet Cong, that I realised how subconsciously and strongly influenced by the American narrative I've been.
Matterhorn by Karl Malantes offered a perspective on the war more familiar to me. While the conflict whispers at the edges of The Quiet American, the heart of this novel, written by a former Marine, is the war of "jungle and mountain and marsh". Both novels give an entirely Western viewpoint, and the Vietnamese remain strange and unknowable. In The Quiet American, Phuong, the woman fought over by the two male protagonists, could stand for Vietnam itself; batted between Westerners who see her as "wonderfully ignorant" of events going on around her and in need of defence, she remains inscrutable to those who claim to love her. In Matterhorn, the Vietnamese are the shadows in the jungle, the faceless "enemy" whose rare appearance is both desired and feared. The only close encounter between Lieutenant Mellas, the main character, and an NVA soldier emphasises the impossibility of communication between them:
"the kid must have guessed that if he didn't throw the grenade Mellas wasn't going to shoot. But he threw the grenade anyway, his lips curling back from his teeth. Fuck you then, Mellas thought bitterly."
This gulf between the Westerners and the Vietnamese in the novels, even those on the same 'side' of the fighting, illustrates the glaring questions posed by the war "attractions"; if the French, then American forces didn't know the Vietnamese, didn't know what they wanted, or really what they themselves wanted to achieve, what was the point of it all? What were they doing there in the first place?
War, always awful in reality, is a good subject for writers. As Marlantes points out in his author's note, "novels need heroes and villains". Then, when these roles get blurred in the mess of war, the author can get to the real stuff of being human. Pyle, the "quiet American", sees himself as a hero, "determined... to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world". Yet his destructive actions force Fowler, the narrator, who prides himself on his detachment, to stop being a simple "reporter" and step in. And Fowler is no hero either, with his unclear and unclean motives. At first, Matterhorn seems more straightforward. Mellas arrives in Vietnam with a clear mission: kill enough of the enemy, and look brave enough doing it, to get a medal and swift promotion. But as war "break[s] life apart and splinter[s] it", and his friends die around him, he becomes desperate for "meaning". Knowledge of the author's own experience of Vietnam adds a terrible pathos to Mellas' attempts to figure it out:
"it occurred to Mellas that he could create the possibility of good and evil through caring. He could nullify the indifferent world. But in so doing he opened himself to the pain of watching it get blown away... he had participated in evil, but this evil had hurt him as well. He also understood that his participation in evil was a result of being human. Being human was the best he could do."
***
After over a month in Cambodia and Vietnam, I got tired of reading about conflict. So I decided to put down the books for a while, and focus on Vietnam as it is today. So much misery seemed impossible in such a beautiful country. It is a visual feast, a photographer's dream. It seemed that every time I turned my head, a picture perfect composition arranged itself for me: boats like giant coconut shells bobbing on the turquoise waters of An Bang beach; jewel-toned lanterns glowing through the twilight in Hoi An; incense smoke clouding the damp air at Thien Mu Pagoda; women in conical hats walking flower-laden bicycles down the heaving streets of Hanoi's Old Quarter. It's too bad I'm a terrible photographer. I'd better go back to the books.
***
Greene, Graham, The Quiet American (1955)
Marlantes, Karl, Matterhorn, (2010)
Meeting people at the airport may be even better than being met yourself. All of the joy, none of the travel. Hannah and Lucy arrived from London to spend two weeks travelling from Ho Chi Minh to Hanoi with me. Travelling solo is great, but you can't beat being ridiculously profound and profoundly ridiculous with good friends on long bus journeys and over cheap cocktails.
***
Our whistle stop journey north began with visits to the War Remnants Museum and the Cu Chi Tunnels, major tourist attractions educating visitors on the "American War". Before I came to Vietnam, I'd assumed that I had a fairly neutral view on the war. It was only when I was faced with naively unexpected, gut-wrenching photographs of American war crimes, and when I watched in horror as the Cu Chi guide proudly demonstrated the grizzly booby traps used on the "enemy" by the Viet Cong, that I realised how subconsciously and strongly influenced by the American narrative I've been.
Matterhorn by Karl Malantes offered a perspective on the war more familiar to me. While the conflict whispers at the edges of The Quiet American, the heart of this novel, written by a former Marine, is the war of "jungle and mountain and marsh". Both novels give an entirely Western viewpoint, and the Vietnamese remain strange and unknowable. In The Quiet American, Phuong, the woman fought over by the two male protagonists, could stand for Vietnam itself; batted between Westerners who see her as "wonderfully ignorant" of events going on around her and in need of defence, she remains inscrutable to those who claim to love her. In Matterhorn, the Vietnamese are the shadows in the jungle, the faceless "enemy" whose rare appearance is both desired and feared. The only close encounter between Lieutenant Mellas, the main character, and an NVA soldier emphasises the impossibility of communication between them:
"the kid must have guessed that if he didn't throw the grenade Mellas wasn't going to shoot. But he threw the grenade anyway, his lips curling back from his teeth. Fuck you then, Mellas thought bitterly."
This gulf between the Westerners and the Vietnamese in the novels, even those on the same 'side' of the fighting, illustrates the glaring questions posed by the war "attractions"; if the French, then American forces didn't know the Vietnamese, didn't know what they wanted, or really what they themselves wanted to achieve, what was the point of it all? What were they doing there in the first place?
War, always awful in reality, is a good subject for writers. As Marlantes points out in his author's note, "novels need heroes and villains". Then, when these roles get blurred in the mess of war, the author can get to the real stuff of being human. Pyle, the "quiet American", sees himself as a hero, "determined... to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world". Yet his destructive actions force Fowler, the narrator, who prides himself on his detachment, to stop being a simple "reporter" and step in. And Fowler is no hero either, with his unclear and unclean motives. At first, Matterhorn seems more straightforward. Mellas arrives in Vietnam with a clear mission: kill enough of the enemy, and look brave enough doing it, to get a medal and swift promotion. But as war "break[s] life apart and splinter[s] it", and his friends die around him, he becomes desperate for "meaning". Knowledge of the author's own experience of Vietnam adds a terrible pathos to Mellas' attempts to figure it out:
"it occurred to Mellas that he could create the possibility of good and evil through caring. He could nullify the indifferent world. But in so doing he opened himself to the pain of watching it get blown away... he had participated in evil, but this evil had hurt him as well. He also understood that his participation in evil was a result of being human. Being human was the best he could do."
***
After over a month in Cambodia and Vietnam, I got tired of reading about conflict. So I decided to put down the books for a while, and focus on Vietnam as it is today. So much misery seemed impossible in such a beautiful country. It is a visual feast, a photographer's dream. It seemed that every time I turned my head, a picture perfect composition arranged itself for me: boats like giant coconut shells bobbing on the turquoise waters of An Bang beach; jewel-toned lanterns glowing through the twilight in Hoi An; incense smoke clouding the damp air at Thien Mu Pagoda; women in conical hats walking flower-laden bicycles down the heaving streets of Hanoi's Old Quarter. It's too bad I'm a terrible photographer. I'd better go back to the books.
***
Greene, Graham, The Quiet American (1955)
Marlantes, Karl, Matterhorn, (2010)
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