Following the Equator

"All of these books that I have chosen helped me on my way, and made me want to write a book myself. These are books that inspire writing. Mark Twain is always taught as the man who wrote Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer , not the man who wrote Following the Equator . It’s the book of a man who loves to travel and loves meeting people. His is an enormous trip. He travels all around the world by steamship on a lecture tour, largely around the British Empire – stopping off in India, Australia, South Africa. He had travelled in Europe before, but Europe doesn’t figure in this book. It’s more the tropical, equatorial world. He was bankrupt because he made a bad investment. Twain always had a lot of schemes, but his major one was a typesetting machine. That was actually a great idea, and if he had put more money in and had more time it probably would have panned out and become profitable. But it didn’t, he lost almost all of his money and went on this lecture tour. I like the humour in the book, and the roominess. He is open to a lot of new experiences, whether it’s in Hawaii or India or South Africa. He’s open to anything, and it’s that receptive mood of the book that I liked. It’s also a book which I discovered myself. I found an old copy, I read it and I asked English professors about it, who dismissed it. But it influenced me deeply, because I thought: I’d like to take a long trip, leaving London, going to Paris, taking the Orient Express, going through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan – which became The Great Railway Bazaar . That all came from this book. That’s right. There are short stories within the narrative. Every travel writer who is worth the name makes his own book. One of the problems with the travel book is that no one knows quite what it is. It’s a very insufficient form, unlike the novel which is a fairly specific thing. The travel book can even be like a novel. Bruce Chatwin said that Songlines should be read like a novel. I never took it as such, but he claimed that he invented and fictionalised a lot. Well, Chatwin was very exuberant about the fact that he was making this up. He was one of a kind, and a master of concealment. I had this conversation with him several times. I don’t think he particularly liked the kind of books that I wrote, and I felt that the books he wrote were an expression of his own forms of concealment – but even in concealment there is a truth. In a way, you know what he is leaving out. In the end, he just wanted to write his own kind of book, and I don’t think that is a betrayal. He was self-dramatising, though, and tended to make a meal of things. He got arrested in Dahomey once, was only held one night in a jail, but you would think he was Alexander Solzhenitsyn from the way he wrote about it. To hold someone’s attention you find yourself either repeating certain things, or embroidering. That’s the nature of storytelling. You are always going to be leaving something out, because who wants to hear about someone standing in line? Who wants to hear about how difficult it is to get a visa, or about your tummy upset? If you lost an arm and a leg, that’s worth talking about, but there’s so much boring stuff that you leave out."