The Songlines (1988)

There was plenty in this book that irritated me, and at times, yes things that fascinated me. Indeed, this book is saved from a one star rating for the simple reason that I found what was conveyed about Australian Aborigine culture and their “Songlines” fascinating. When Chatwin kept to his personal observations of the people of the Outback, whether of European extraction or Aboriginal, I was riveted. I have to admit this book did what the best books do--inspire me to read more on the subject--but alas even fifteen years after this book’s publication there’s blessed little to be found on the subject of Aborigine culture easily accessible to the general reader--that you can find by browsing the neighborhood bookstore or library. This book is easily the best known.

I recently read Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country and Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, and both spoke of the Aborigines of Australia as one of the oldest cultures; it was claimed they had been basically unchanged since humans became a behaviorally distinct species--at least until European settlement ended their isolation. As such, they’ve long fascinated anthropologists as a possible window into human pre-history. Chatwin believed they’re a key to a past when humans were constantly on the move, prey to the “Great Beast,” a sabre-tooth cat for whom we were their favorite meal. The “songlines” or “dreaming tracks” are songs that mark routes which the Aborigines believe were walked by the Ancestor totems and must be followed and sung to keep the land alive. The very melody and rhythm of the song can mark direction and distance. Chatwin described songlines as "the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known ... to the Aboriginals as the 'Footprints of the Ancestors' or the 'Way of the Law'.” So songlines are myth, law, trade routes and maps--even land deeds. Chatwin believed all cultures had their songlines, often preserved in their myths.

All good. The problem is I find Chatwin maddeningly meandering and unreliable. He himself said that. “To call The Songlines fiction is misleading. To call it non-fiction is an absolute lie.” He doesn’t distinguish clearly in his text between one and the other. Worse, according to the introduction by Rory Stewart, who admired Chatwin’s books, “he inserted images and symbols, from other poems, painting, and myths, copied other people’s sentences and structures”--and without attribution. Stewart doesn’t use the word, but by any other name this is plagiarism--to me a writer’s greatest sin. According to Stewart, Chatwin wouldn’t hesitate to distort and invent in the stories of his travels in order to call up parallels and allusions to classic works. The people who appear in the book are mostly based on real people--but let’s just say that even according to the man who wrote the introduction to this book, well, you shouldn’t judge the people by the portrait, and it’s probably kind that in many cases Chatwin changed their names and personal details.

The other thing that drove me batty was the section “From the Notebook” which took up about a third of the book. Chatwin carried his notes in moleskin notebooks, and considered them more precious than his passport. Unfortunately he felt the need to share excerpts with us--at length--that mostly consisted of quotations from other books, what comes down to lecture notes, and vignettes from other travels. This is mostly where he details his anthropological theories about the origins of language, the nomadic nature of humans and our predation by the “Great Beast” and what it meant for human culture. Stewart called Chatwin “erudite” but for me especially here he comes across to me as a poseur. He never really pulls his theories together. It’s all very scattershot. So, is the book worth reading? Sorta. I’m rather glad I did because the picture of the Aborigines intrigued me and left me wanting to know more, but I was constantly wishing I was reading a more solidly factual book on them. ( )

Chatwin alla ricerca della natura umana. Così sintetizzerei Le vie dei canti. Una natura che secondo l’autore è nomade: la sedentarietà moderna è solo una prigione cui l’uomo cerca di sottrarsi. All’inizio lo scopo del libro non risulta evidente. Salta all’occhio certamente la sua natura di diario, di resoconto di viaggio. In questo senso ritroviamo il solito Chatwin: una narrazione legata a persone e fatti e non a luoghi e paesaggi. Alla ricerca delle Vie dei Canti, mitici racconti della creazione degli aborigeni australiani, Chatwin cerca la conferma della natura nomade dell’uomo. Ma è solo oltre la metà del libro che questo scopo risulta finalmente evidente, quando l’autore ci presenta estratti dei suoi famosi moleskine tutti volti a ricercare le ragioni del nomadismo, attraverso riflessioni sui testi sacri, sulle abitudini dell’uomo e sui suoi stessi viaggi.
Chi voglia avvicinarsi a questo testo quindi deve farlo nel modo corretto: non si troverà un racconto di viaggio sull’Australia ma un’intesa e, a parere di chi scrive, meravigliosa trattazione su ciò che ci spinge a esplorare, conoscere, viaggiare. ( )

Chatwin alla ricerca della natura umana. Così sintetizzerei Le vie dei canti. Una natura che secondo l’autore è nomade: la sedentarietà moderna è solo una prigione cui l’uomo cerca di sottrarsi. All’inizio lo scopo del libro non risulta evidente. Salta all’occhio certamente la sua natura di diario, di resoconto di viaggio. In questo senso ritroviamo il solito Chatwin: una narrazione legata a persone e fatti e non a luoghi e paesaggi. Alla ricerca delle Vie dei Canti, mitici racconti della creazione degli aborigeni australiani, Chatwin cerca la conferma della natura nomade dell’uomo. Ma è solo oltre la metà del libro che questo scopo risulta finalmente evidente, quando l’autore ci presenta estratti dei suoi famosi moleskine tutti volti a ricercare le ragioni del nomadismo, attraverso riflessioni sui testi sacri, sulle abitudini dell’uomo e sui suoi stessi viaggi.
Chi voglia avvicinarsi a questo testo quindi deve farlo nel modo corretto: non si troverà un racconto di viaggio sull’Australia ma un’intesa e, a parere di chi scrive, meravigliosa trattazione su ciò che ci spinge a esplorare, conoscere, viaggiare. ( )

Effete yet hardened Brit hits the colonies following the Aboriginal Songlines, the paths the Ancestors carved across the sky as they created the world; sends us back his observations, tries to prove his theories. I started out worried because Chatwin is a bad writer who is also trying to sell himself half-heartedly as an "old (fill in country here, as long as it's dry and hot) hand," which doesn't work because he's too effete (and also because it's 1988, you toffee-nosed fuck), and with the other half of his heart trying to sell himself as hapless/a fish out of water, which doesn't work because he takes himself too serious. So you end up idling for a while at the beginning listening to him lecture the locals about how "pastoral nomad" is a tautology like those horrible people who sneer at you for saying "the hoi polloi."

Luckily that doesn't last long, and it becomes clear, first, that Chatwin, much as he's far too awkward to render himself in a way that doesn't smack of overcompensating, has a decent hand at rendering the characters he meets--his local bro Arkady, a kind of tawny mannish guide for the pom out of water; Marian, his love interest, the magnificent blonde den mother for the Aboriginal children, which kind of makes you wish Chatwin had done her justice and not rendered her a cliche but is a stirring portrait nonetheless Alex the old man in the desert in the nightgown; lonely Communists with bad bellies, defrocked priests, iron-pumping Spinoza-reading rural cops, vivid encounters in endless tin shacks. This is worthwhile.

And it becomes clear also that much as he calls this "fiction," Chatwin's not here to post us his Oz tales per se, or even tell us much about the songlines in the end, which I rue (I craved an academic appendix for a while; I craved more stories like the one about the lizard that lost his wife and ate the dingo babies and got indigestion; I still want to know exactly how the contour of the melody defines the contour of the land). The idea of all the old things and all the modern things--cars and such, like in the Björk song--always existing, asleep under ground till the time comes for them to wake up and sing their world into being; the practical confrontations this causes between people for whom the land is sacred and every feature alive and, like, white dudes in bulldozers--this is good stuff. Chatwin's theories about language beginning in song (well, yes--we can hardly call this "Chatwin's" theory, can we) and song beginning in the need to pick one's way through a landscape, the first songs telling us where and how to go (nice), and that need to move being fundamental, a need to run from a primordial Beast that Chatwin speculates was a sabre-toothed monster specialized to predate on proto-humans woozy from having been forced by climate change to turn from tree- to savannah-dwellers--all of this is worthwhile as well, if pat.

And he even gets away with the "when I was dining with the imam" and "they offered me sixty goats for my sperm"-type shit, because the anecdotes and snippets of diaries and quotes and ideas and descriptions of bones that as the book goes on barely hold together into a coherent anything anymore, perhaps a notebook (although actually going on at length about his fucking moleskines was a questionable decision) but really more just a bundle of talk for walks, a diverting where-do-you-come-from-and-where-are-you-going that makes you yearn to go a-journey or excited about being away, a bushel, yes of course, of small, soon-faltering yet still wriggly and beautiful songlines, a quickly sketched take on amazing places and big ideas from a soul on the move. ( )