Christmas books review: Travel

Published on Thursday 4 December 2008 15:53

SO YOU'VE BEEN TO PARADISE, ON a package deal, all-inclusive, but somehow you've never been to you. You feel empty inside. A common dilemma. What should you do? Go get a life? Or get a book?

Try a travel book, of the "footsteps" genre – tracing the paths of seminal explorers, writers, adventurers or soldiers (often with spiritual exploration as the subtext). Could this be your guide to true inner knowledge?

Take Paul Theroux, who this year succumbed to the footsteps temptation. Being Theroux, he followed his own.

Not Theroux's best book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (Hamish Hamilton, 20) lovingly revisits the watering holes of his 1975 classic, The Great Railway Bazaar. You may need an atlas by your side to track the journey, but the writing, if sometimes lacking the sheer delight of Theroux the Younger, is as compelling as 33 years ago.

From London to Tokyo via Turkey, Uzbekistan, Malaysia and all points east, then back at a chunter on the Trans-Siberian Express from Vladivostock, Theroux brings a piquancy and vibrant curiosity to travel writing that few of his peers can match.

Among this year's crop devoted to travel as discovery, Strange Telescopes (Faber and Faber, 14.99) by Daniel Kalder and Bandit Roads (Little, Brown, 16.99) by Richard Grant, stand out as great reads that delve convincingly into (respectively) the belly of the former Soviet Union and the seething, frightening mess that is the lawless heart of Mexico's infamous badlands, the surreal Sierra Madre.

Classics reissued and well worth discovering afresh are Jan Morris's Spain (Faber & Faber, 7.99), published four decades ago and still riveting, and Tim Robinson's Stones of Arran: Pilgrimage (Faber and Faber, 12.99), which leaves no significant stone unturned and is a paen to island life, comprised of dreams. Enduring Cuba (Lonely Planet, 7.99) by Zo Bran, another reissue (from six years ago), is maybe the finest modern serious exploration of Castro's legacy, catching the troubled and troubling complexities of a country ill at ease in beautifully clear, highly readable prose.

Of the humorous travel tomes on offer, Ebury Press has produced two winners in Danny Wallace's Friends Like These (11.99), in which our hero scoots round the planet attempting to resurrect old buddies, and, even better, Dave Gorman's America Unchained (11.99), an intrepid road trip in an old station wagon, departing from San Diego, veering due north, then dipping south-east to the coast of Georgia, looking for signs of real life lived. Hardeep Singh Kohli has also struck gold with his Indian Takeaway: One Man's Attempt to Cook His Way Home (Canongate, 16.99), in which he serves up pukkah British grub to Indian palates – with a grin. But the funniest writer of the year surely has to be Geoff Hill, whose alternative A-Z of the world, called Anyway, Where Was I? (Blackstaff Press, 9.99), is a rare combination of wit and droll wisdom full of meticulous observations of human foible and human triumph. A laugh-out-loud must.

Home terrain is superbly covered by The Highways and Byways of Britain (Macmillan, 12.99), edited by David Milner – a miscellany of extracts from the original 36 volumes, covering all of the British Isles during the five decades up to 1948. More than nostalgia, it paints an affectionate view of history rooted in nature, a rural slowing down of time, every extract written with diligence. Diligence also underpins the compendious Britain & Ireland's Best Wild Places (Allen Lane, 25), by Christopher Somerville. Outdoors enthusiasts keen on mountainscapes, wild flowers, forgotten woodlands and faded pathways should not leave home without a copy snug in their rucksacks.

Armchair travellers haven't been forgotten this year. For sheer lavishness look no farther than the treasure trove that is India (Dorling Kindersley, 25), with text and pictures so evocative that you can taste, smell and touch the sub-continent's melee of sensory madness. Another gem is Francesco's Mediterranean Voyage (BBC Books, 25) – Francesco da Mosto's pilgrimage mingling history and myth with a salty sultriness that flirts with the modern-exotic, from Venice to Istanbul – a treat.

But my find of the year is Frank Westerman's Ararat (Harvill Secker, 16.99) – slim on the outside, yet freighted with knowledge, allusion and instinct, the traveller's traveller heads to Mount Ararat in Turkey, in search of the mythic, poetic wreckage of Noah's Ark. The writing glows with Westerman's heightened sense of narrative drama, pitching faith against a trawl for physical evidence of the ark. An enthralling quest.