Travel

Monisha Rajesh wrote lovingly about the Indian railways in her previous book, Around India in 80 Trains; but her new one set her wondering whether the train journey had lost its allure elsewhere — for which there is a strong case to be made in Britain, at least. The constant outpouring of anger in the media about the horrors of modern travel seems to have captured the public mood: the delays, the cancellations, the overcrowding, the fatuous announcements, the garish logos of the privatised companies and the overspending on major projects all seem set to undermine our love of the railways. Rajesh, however, muses that the greater threat might in fact come from an unexpected direction — that the trains are now too good.

‘We had seen God in his splendours, heard the text that nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.’ Ernest Shackleton’s lines unscroll through both these complementary books. David Grann’s The White Darkness is all-man, the gripping story of mighty but quite straightforward struggles. The Library of Ice, brimming with men, women, ships, science, complexity, brevity and beauty, has a precision and quiet brilliance which suggest the feminine. In fact, these qualities belong simply to the author, Nancy Campbell. Readers will finish her quasi-travel book, a search for an ‘understanding’ of ice, wary of any idleness of expression, any generality in thought. Campbell seems incapable of either.

Ask most people whether they fancy a four-month, 5,000-mile trek across the Middle East and they might conclude you need your head seen to. With civil war raging in Syria, Iraq mired in internecine conflict while mopping up the remnants of Daesh, al-Qa’eda running amok in southern Yemen and simmering strife between Israelis and Palestinians, walking across 13 countries might not seem like an obvious itinerary. But Levison Wood, it is fair to say, is not your average traveller. A committed biped, he is the author of a trio of books on walking the Nile, Himalayas and Americas respectively. Ostensibly unlike the other television-led journeys which preceded it, this expedition was meant to be a lower key affair, though online publicity for an accompanying documentary suggests otherwise.

A book that opens in a Lahore refugee camp, shifts to Cat Bells Fell, rising above the shores of Derwentwater, and then swoops between the Ranigunj coalfields in Bengal, Belsize Park, a handicrafts exhibition at Kharagpur, Kensington Gore, military intelligence headquarters in Calcutta, an aircraft factory in Wembley and the Himalayas is bound to keep its readers jumping. In The Last Englishmen, Deborah Baker has written an exuberant, scene-changing, shapeshifting group biography, with John Auden and Michael Spender as its chief human protagonists. But she makes the Himalayas, and Mount Everest, palpable and vivid characters in her story too. John Auden was the geologist elder brother of W.H. Auden and became a global expert on the Himalayas.

In 1969 the body of an ape-like creature, preserved in ice inside an insulated box, came to light in Minnesota. Its provenance was unclear, but the rumour went round that it was a Bigfoot, the North American equivalent of the Himalayan yeti. After two days peering through the box’s glass cover, the Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans convinced himself that the rumour was correct. His description of the Minnesota Iceman was published in the Bulletin of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. It included the detail that ‘when erect, the penis would certainly not have been particularly striking in its dimensions’. As if this wasn’t bad enough for the poor animal, it later transpired that its penis, along with the rest of its body, was made of latex.

Few writers seem less deserving of resuscitation than Henry Miller. When the Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside was asked to contribute the latest volume of Princeton’s ‘Writers on Writers’ series, he planned to choose Marianne Moore, a clearer influence on his poetry. Miller was too messy. A non-conformist and autodidact, his most famous novel, Tropic of Cancer, opened the door to literary obscenity, and also gave him the reputation of a pornographer. Burnside admits that he wrote the book less from a conscious decision than ‘out of need’. To his credit, he does not skirt Miller’s notoriety, nor does he deny that much of his subject’s erotic writing is ‘embarrassing’.