Journey Without Maps

I am generally an admirer of Graham Greene's writing, but didn't much enjoy this book. This is not informative, intelligent, self-aware or compelling in the way that, say, Paul Theroux travelogues are; instead, what comes across is the author's then (1935) blinkered view of Africa and Africans and a near-absence of reflections on his own mindset or those of the generally accommodating people he encountered. It is a peculiarly myopic view of a brief, purposeless journey on foot from village to village through Liberia in West Africa supported by dozens of native porters. The presence of his female cousin on this trip with him is barely mentioned. Overall - barring the oddly ill-fitting final chapter on Liberian politics and wider show more reflections - the tone is that of Henry Morton Stanley's depressingly Eurocentric but far more purposeful expeditions through Central Africa some sixty years earlier. show less

Graham Greene is, of course, more celebrated for his fiction than for anything else, but this, a book of travel writing as he made his way through Sierra Leone and Liberia, is a masterpiece of the genre and as worth reading today as when it was published. I haven't visited either of these countries myself, but I am familiar with the discomforts of exploring Africa - I wove my way from Ghana to South Africa overland more than a decade ago - and so much of what Greene writes rings true: the illness, the dirt, the lack of food, but also the warmth of the people he met, and the beauty of the places he saw.

Of course it's very dated, but I wanted to see why it's considered a classic of travel writing. Can be summed up as trying to explore his subconscious and childhood fears by going off road in Liberia with the assistance of numerous porters for his huge amount of baggage. His cousin was with him, only occasionally mentioned. Now I want to read her book, but it's out of print.

What triggered Graham Greene and his cousin to march through a forsaken part of Africa? A truly masochistic undertaking of exploring misery and enduring uncomfortable moments just for the kick of writing a book (or two books as his cousin published her account too). Perhaps the lack of interaction may have been usual for the upper middle class then, but Greene and his cousin might nearly have been on separate trips as they rarely perform anything together or speak with one another. Greene actually pioneers a Thomas Friedmanesque approach of only speaking to either chieftains (CEOs) or servants.

The big take-away for me is that we in Europe are blessed with relatively benign crawly creatures whereas Africa is plagued by nasty, aggressive show more and invasive critters and an adverse climate. I prefer not to live in a country where books will rot away in no time. Greene learned this too and later stayed in beautiful decadent Capri where he was at liberty to enjoy his vices. show less

Greene's description of a journey into the interior of Liberia. While there are a lot of assumptions about African culture and people, Greene is a more acute and honest observer of himself than many travelers. In my opinion, that makes this book worth reading as Greene interrogates the "travel adventure" impulse.

Another of the "100 greatest adventure books" that I found it impossible to get through -- I abandoned Greene's book when I was three-quarters of the way through after realizing it wouldn't get much better.

I found Greene's general attitude toward those he met on his walk across Liberia and his treatment of his porters to be really irritating. Nothing much of interest happens on his walk across the country either. A grating narrator and a tepid account of what should have been a grand adventure helps make this book extremely dull.

Graham Greene is a famous 20th C novelist ("The Orient Express") who also wrote a few non-fiction travel accounts. This is his first, when he was 31 years old and left Europe for the first time, in order to experience the uncivilized "dark heart of Africa" by traveling through the back country of Liberia in 1935. It was a 4-week, 350-mile walk, mostly through an unchanging tunnel forest path, ending each day in a primitive village. He had about a dozen black porters who would carry him in a sling, although he walked much of the way.

It's written with a very "old school" perspective, with one foot in the 19th (or 18th) century of romantic colonial imperialism, and one foot in the pre-war 1930s perspective of deterioration, rot and things show more falling apart. Heavy whiskey drinking, descriptions of the festering diseases of the natives, and plethora of bothersome insects, the run down European outposts and a motley cast of white rejects fill many descriptive pages.

It reminds me a lot of Samuel Johnson's "Journals of the Western Isles" (1770s) when Johnson, who had never left England in his life, decided to go to Scotland to see what uncivilized people were like. Just as Johnson brought Boswell who would go on to write his own version of the trip, Greene brought his female cousin Barbara Greene (who remains unnamed in the book and largely unmentioned), who went on to write her own version of the trip in the 1970s called "Too Late to Turn Back", which mostly contradicts Grahams version.

I can't say I totally enjoyed this book, I found Greene's attitude irritating - but therein lies its value, as a snapshot of prewar European zeitgeist. It is reminiscent of "Kabloona" (1940), another prewar travel account to an uncivilized place (Arctic Eskimos) by a young European aristocrat, who also is deeply inward looking and finds a new perspective and appreciation for the "cave man" people he meets. It's very much a transition period between prewar and post-war attitudes and the fluctuation's back and forth, the sense of things falling apart, but also new-found perspective, make it a challenging but interesting work. show less