The West Indies and the Spanish Main

"But he’s funny about it. Did you notice the common denominator in my book choices? Three of them – Naipaul, Trollope and Twain – are novelists. That is first of all because I am. A novelist should be a good traveller. And second because the ability to write fiction – to describe someone, to write dialogue – is helpful to someone writing a travel book. It’s what Conrad said about his intentions in writing: “To make you hear, to make you feel… before all, to make you see ”. Trollope has that ability in spades. He is tremendously gregarious and very funny. He wrote The West Indies and the Spanish Main on the trip itself, and when his ship arrived back in Britain the book was done. It is a vivid portrait of a lot of different places – Cuba, Jamaica, Trinidad, Nicaragua – and he had a great ability to describe people, both in a physical sense and in how they talked. He is a wonderful writer of dialogue, both in his travel books and in his novels. Twain had that too, whereas Cherry-Garrard didn’t. I don’t think there’s the temptation to fictionalise. There might be a temptation to over-describe. You want to make the characters live. It’s like what I said earlier about leaving the boring bits out. The poor travel writer puts everything down. The good travel writer is selective. And the travel writer who is also a fiction writer knows how to choose what matters in the journey. Naipaul knew that, Trollope knew it, and I hope that I know it. Because the last thing that you want to be is a bore. The problem with people talking about their travels is that they tend to be pretty boring. There are those who are great raconteurs, and have people on the edges of their chairs, but most people are terribly boring when talking about their holidays or year abroad. We did this, then we went there – you can edit that all out. Yes, Trollope was there on a job, to do a survey in Jamaica and Cuba on how to send letters from the Caribbean to Britain. He was a serious civil servant and postal employee, not just some functionary in the post office who also wrote novels. Did you know that he invented the red pillar box? It was his idea. That they are still using them in Britain is amazing."