The Condor and the Cows

"Modern travel books on South America are so scarce and generally cliché-ridden that it is wonderful to find one so fresh, funny and perceptive as Christopher Isherwood’s beautifully written The Condor and the Cows. Isherwood, curiously enough, had no desire to write this book (he was commissioned by his American publishers), and developed a general distaste for the continent, and for the Andes in particular, which he found claustrophobic and gloomy. The book is appropriately sarcastic, curmudgeonly and iconoclastic, in a way that prefigures Paul Theroux’s Patagonian Express. Yet, whereas Theroux has little of interest to say about the Andes (his whole attitude towards the mountains was determined by altitude sickness), Isherwood shows continual curiosity in the politics, culture and history of the countries he goes through. In Ecuador, for instance, he goes out of his way to meet the leading Ecuadorean painter Guaysamin, and finds him a charismatic person who had begun to inspire an indigenous cultural revival. Many of Isherwood’s political judgments are very pertinent today. And he got the Incas absolutely right. He recognised the greatness of Inca civilisation without in any way idealising it, as do so many other writers. The Incas were as bloodthirsty as the Spaniards, and no less brutally imperialistic; and, as with the similarly romanticised Muslim civilisation in Spain, their downfall was greatly assisted by internal dissent. I think that Isherwood would have been in agreement with many of the views of the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who attributes to the Incas the gloomier side to his nation’s character, and who is critical of such present-day political correctness as replacing a statue of Pizarro in Lima’s main square with an entirely bogus Inca flag (the Incas, of course, never had a flag). Isherwood himself memorably characterised the Incas in terms of ‘Much ritual, little spirituality. Much gold, little elegance. Much feasting, little fun.’"