How to Talk About Places You've Never Been: On the Importance of Armchair Travel

"How to Talk About Places You ’ve Never Been by Pierre Bayard is perhaps the least philosophical of my choices. It’s about the importance of armchair travel. It’s written by a literary professor and it’s a tongue-in-cheek, extended argument as to why armchair travel can be even better than real world travel. Yes, I don’t know when we will be able to real world travel again, but in the meantime, this is a great humorous take on why we should all be armchair travelling. It’s written to be funny, but it’s packed with lots of serious material on the nature of armchair travel. The serious material is not tongue-in-cheek, but throughout the book his thesis—that armchair travel is always better than real world travel—is, I think, meant to be tongue-in-cheek. That’s a theme that you find in de Botton. Earlier, you asked about differences between my book and de Botton’s. Here is another one. I once read a Guardian review of The Art of Travel that complained de Botton doesn’t seem to like travel very much. I get that feeling too—it comes across in his discussions about the expectation of travelling being better than the reality. I hope, in my book, it comes across that I love it. Bayard is concerned with a number of things including the fact it’s much safer to travel by armchair than in the real world. There’s none of the inconvenience, you can remain sleeping in your own bed, you don’t have to faff around with porters or train tickets and endure long and uncomfortable journeys. It’s a lot easier, you don’t run into difficulties and you can learn much more about a place by reading about it than by visiting. And he goes on to provide lots of examples. “Something that I loved learning about is the history of travel writing. I hadn’t appreciated, for example, that it really exploded in the 17th century” These include, for example, a French travel writer called Chateaubriand. He wrote lots about visiting the United States and large chunks of it seem to have been made up. There are rivers in his books and places that move around when he’s describing different locations in the States—but that doesn’t seem to matter because it’s as though he’s captured the essence of the places, even though he never visited. The book is brilliant—very funny. He uses his own system of notations that say things like ‘NV’ for never visited. He covers the Marco Polo controversy. Marco Polo in theory travelled widely through Asia including China, yet lots of scholars think he never got any further than Constantinople. But perhaps he didn’t need to. I think you could run a Mary’s Room thought argument about this. Mary is sitting in a room, with guidebooks about Japan. If she is then transported to Japan, does she learn anything new? Yes. I certainly think Mary would learn something new where she to step out onto the streets of Japan. But I do think she could learn an awful lot from books as well. I love books as much as I love travelling. I think so too. Something that I loved learning about is the history of travel writing. I hadn’t appreciated, for example, that it really exploded in the 17th century. I thought it would have been around in quantity for a lot longer. The Age of Discovery blew the whole thing up. I suspect the printing press also had something to do with it. Travel to far flung places was easier and books were more readily available. The book is not obviously raising philosophical issues, though if you run something like the Mary’s Room thought experiment, you can make it philosophical. But one of the issues simmering below the surface of the entire book is, ‘what is the relationship between fact and fiction?’ That is hugely philosophical, the relationship between the world inside our heads and the world out there. That runs like a thread through the whole book and I think it’s fabulous."