The Way of the World

"It’s translated from the French because I think he was Swiss, and it’s about a journey in the 1950s from Belgrade to India. They try to go to India in a tiny battered Fiat and it takes them several years, these friends, and it probably describes the attraction of travel better than any book I’ve ever read. They spend quite a lot of time in Turkey and Iran and Afghanistan. He is going to India and the book ends as he goes into Pakistan. A lot of it is set in cafés and one thing and another – it’s a diary. I remember a little bit in there when they’re setting out one morning into a semi-desert landscape and the rising sun catches the plumage of the quails and partridges, and it’s a magical moment when he just sees that this is what travel is all about."

"Bouvier follows some of the trail of Robert Byron, travelling to the Khyber Pass in 1953-54. But the book is mostly set in Turkey and western Iran, where they get stuck. Bouvier never wrote another book comparable to this one. I loved it for its humanity, for its footloose feeling. He says somewhere, “You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you.” And you feel that he’s a very vulnerable traveller. I love that sense of not having a planned journey – it might go anywhere. He travelled in this funny little car, a Fiat Topolino. I travelled in Russia in a Morris Marina, which people laughed at, and it secures your independence. It’s surprising how many travel writers have travelled with a companion and not acknowledged them. I think Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene both did so in the 1930s, and didn’t even mention in their books that the fellow traveller was there. I travel without, because I think you’re more sensitive without a companion. And the more the companion belongs to your own culture, the more insulated you’re likely to be in your own world. If you’re alone, you’re forced to get an understanding of where you are because you have no cultural references. If you imagine walking down the aisle of a ruined cathedral, and there’s someone with you, some of your attention is given to the companion and to their reaction. If you’re alone, the outside is pouring in on you and there’s nothing to give you comfort in the literal sense. You’re absolutely exposed. And that’s why I like to be solitary. That’s been my instinct, for better or for worse. There are books that labour terribly, as if it’s a tremendous deal to be buying a ticket – as it can be in a Chinese provincial railway station – but I think after a bit that becomes tedious. I think you want it known what these difficulties are, but not to have it as a running theme. It becomes wearisome in the end. What’s important is the culture, not what the travel writer happens to be going through in terms of superficial difficulties. Something funny goes on in my case when I’m travelling to write a book. The hardships get very minimised, I don’t worry much about what’s happening. I feel it’s nice copy for the book, but it doesn’t occur to me as hardship. But it’s fun to write about it sometimes – to convey the mad bus with no glass in the windows and no springs in the seats."