An Inconvenience of Penguins by Jamie Lafferty review: 'full of emotional ups and downs'
Jamie Lafferty’s account of several years spent trying to see every one of the 18 different species of penguin scattered around the globe manages to be both laugh-out-loud funny and surprisingly emotional, writes Roger Cox
Much like some of the endangered species of penguin covered in this book, travel writers seem to be under threat from all sides these days. On the one hand, the newspapers and magazines that once carried large travel sections and paid well (OK, paid) for words to fill them now find themselves having to trim budgets. On the other hand, the travel industry - which has traditionally covered travel journalists' costs in exchange for coverage - no longer needs them in quite the same way it used to: a social media influencer with bazillions of followers on Instagram can now do more to promote a destination with a single image-and-caption post than even the most talented wordsmith can manage with a carefully-crafted 2,000-word feature. And of course, in addition to these practical considerations there are now the ethics of travel writing to consider: at a time when mass-tourism is such a major contributor to climate change, is it still OK to make a living by flying around the world and effectively encouraging others to do the same?
To his credit, multi-award-winning travel writer Jamie Lafferty engages with all these questions in An Inconvenience of Penguins - his account of several years spent trying to see every one of the 18 different species of penguin scattered around the globe. In fact, he does much more than engage with them - he folds them into his story in such a way that they give it both emotional depth and a refreshing honesty.
Lafferty's quest begins during the dark days of 2020, as the world grinds to a locked-down halt and suddenly the very idea of being a travel writer seems impossible. He characterises this time as "a year of online calls and offline despair, of squalor and alcohol. A year of fear." He's disarmingly up-front about the precariousness of the travel writing life at the best of times; equally forthcoming about the stress this can cause. Nevertheless, by September he's in Italy, reminiscing fondly about a trip to South Georgia, where he had a magical encounter with penguins (Kings and Gentoos) and cooking up a plan to visit the Galapagos Islands where, thanks to an easing of lockdown restrictions in that part of the world, he might be able to spend more time with these "demented little fun machines". It's on this subsequent trip that he encounters his "spark bird" - a Galapagos penguin - the creature that really catapults him off on his quest. "If I could regain control of my travel writing career," he writes, "I could perhaps manipulate it to see more penguins, generate more of this glee."
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He has to wait until 2022, "when my travel writing work flickered back to life", before he can resume his mission, but once the world starts getting back to normal Lafferty's off, ping-ponging around the globe like a single-minded, penguin-seeking missile. He travels to various locations in Antarctica, as you'd expect, but also to less well-known penguin habitats, including Chile (to see Humboldt penguins), the Falklands (Macaronis and Southern Rockhoppers), New Zealand (Snares and Hoihos) and Tasmania (Little penguins).
In an attempt to gain an audience with the Magellanic penguins of Argentina, he is unable to leverage his travel writing contacts so organises and funds the trip himself. "On review," he writes, "this was a mistake." A self-drive portion of his journey goes badly sideways when a remote petrol station indicated by Google Maps turns out not to have any fuel. Disaster stories make for great copy though, and Lafferty's Argentine misadventure, expertly described, is easily one of the highlights of the book. Also laugh-out-loud funny: the passage where he takes LSD while spending the day alone with a colony of Southern Rockhoppers and Gentoos in the Falklands.
Towards the end of the book, Lafferty begins to question the point of his mission. Fair enough, you might say. Yet his quest clearly brought him a measure of joy, and his account of it - always engaging and surprisingly full of emotional ups and downs for a book about birds - will bring joy to countless others. Surely that's reason enough.
An Inconvenience of Penguins, by Jamie Lafferty, Wildfire, £22
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