Book review - More to Life

The fictionalised travel memoir More to Life (2017),  'based on real events', is by Maureen Moss, an inveterate globetrotter. It is at turns illuminating, poignant and amusing.

Approaching her fiftieth year, suffering the trauma of divorce, loss of job and sale of house, Rachael Green decides to ‘find herself’ by travelling to the Far East. Small snag: she has three children, two of them teenagers. It’s agreed she’ll take Conrad and Sara, leaving the youngest Sophie with her ex. Sophie can join them at the tail-end of their jaunt in Australia. Simple, really. Brave. Or possibly foolhardy. These events take place in 1997; it might be riskier attempting this kind of journey these days.

First stop, the Indian subcontinent. We’re treated to the sights, smells, the poverty, and the wonderful tigers. Travelling on a shoe-string budget meant that their accommodation wasn’t quite what they were used to. ‘In our dark, damp, dingy, smelly rooms cockroaches scurried up the walls, across the ceiling and down the opposite side. Sitting on the toilet in the one-metre-square shower room required keeping your feet above the floor level to avoid the creatures scrambling over your toes.’ (p117)

From time to time, Rachael sends a letter to Sophie, possibly to sooth her angst over leaving her daughter. And her thoughts dwelled on her decision: ‘I was hauling them around places where dead bodies lay unnoticed, where extreme poverty and physical deformities were commonplace, and where parents had to sell their children.’ (p118)

There are plenty of amusing interludes to lighten the mood, such as travelling in a railway compartment designed for six people yet accommodating fifteen, some of whom used the luggage racks as extra seating.

Then it’s on to south-east Asia, starting in Singapore, then to Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. They’re joined by Rachael’s sister-in-law Louise who has left home, and Gecko, a friend of Conrad’s, and Michael, the boyfriend of Sara. These additional mouths to feed strain the budget further, but provide more conflict, amusement and distractions: penalty for removing pebbles from the beach, five to ten years’ imprisonment. Rachael says she reads a lot on the journey – though doesn’t explain what; was this before the e-reader? Then there’s Sara’s scream, when a huge cricket jumped in between her boobs! (p165) and Michael’s worry about safety when they’re floating in the river in a boat made from a B52 bomber fuel tank – during a lightning storm! (p166)

I don’t know why Rachael should feel she needs to atone for being part of the human race, for being one of a species capable of the appalling slaughter and inhumanity of the Pol Pot regime. You can be appalled without feeling misplaced guilt, surely? (p182)

From the tragic to the frivolous. There’s a joke that Rachael makes about the Mekong Delta, referring to the emperor from the Flash Gordon adventures. Unfortunately, the Mekon was a Dan Dare villain; Emperor Ming was the Flash Gordon villain! As Sara observed, ‘You’re funny, Ma – not.’

The book is teeming with vivid description, such as: ‘Images flashed past, of baskets suspended from shoulder poles, water buffalo gently swishing their tails in muddy rivers, field workers in conical hats bent low as they toiled. In the villages barefoot skinny children played in rubbish-strewn streets… monkeys approached lopsidedly to steal bananas…’ (p192)

Of all the places she visited Rachael seemed most affected by Vietnam and its stoic gentle people. (p237)

Did Rachael ‘find herself’? You’ll need to read this always entertaining, colourful and thought-provoking book to find out. At the very least she proved that there’s more to life than feeling sorry for yourself. Highly recommended.

A shorter version of this review will appear on Amazon.

Book review - The Places in Between

Aged 29, Rory Stewart set out from Kabul in January 2002 to walk from Herat to Kabul in Afghanistan. He wore traditional walking clothes for that country: a long shalwar kemis shirt, baggy trousers and a Chitrali cap, with a brown patu blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

He had previously walked in Iran, Pakistan and Nepal and considered this outing ‘adventure’ to connect his walk in Iran with that in Pakistan. He was advised by several that he was going to his grave. The Taliban had left Herat a mere six weeks before he arrived, and there were still plenty of sympathisers lurking in the hinterland. Indeed, ‘twelve foreign war reporters had been killed in Afghanistan in the previous two months’ (p59)

Stewart seemed reasonably well equipped as he speaks some French, Persian (Dari), and Indonesian. He has also studied Latin, Greek, Russian, Chinese, Serbo-Croat, Urdu, and Nepali languages, though he reckons the last three are ‘very rusty’.

He had to trudge through snow a lot of the way, over inhospitable terrain, from small village to small village, following the Hari Rud River. He met a fascinating assortment of people. Some days he would subsist solely on bread and rice, and attempted to sterilise drinking water with chlorine tablets. The journey took him 36 days, and while reading this I felt I was there much of the time!

He came across the Minaret of Jam, re-discovered in its isolated place in 1943.

 Minaret of Jam - Wikipedia commons

Now a UNESCO World Heritage site, it stands 65m (213ft) and its provenance is a mystery, though it is believed to date from at least the 1100s. Illegal digging that began in 2002, while Stewart passed through, has uncovered a great deal of archaeological remains, suggesting perhaps here lay the lost city of the Turquoise Mountain, which was razed by Genghis.

‘Genghis obliterated the other great cities of the eastern Islamic world, massacring their scholars and artisans, turning the irrigated lands of central Asia into a waterless wilderness and dealing a blow to the Muslim world from which it barely recovered.’ (p174)

On page 143 he is introduced to Babur the dog; in fact he named the animal, in honour of Babur in whose footsteps he now trod. Babur had golden fur, black brindle and white round the muzzle, and was a mastiff, its ears and tail having been lopped off for fighting. It had very few teeth and weighed about ten stone. The village mastiffs were bred to fight and guard against wolves, dogs and other humans. Thereafter, he accompanied Rory for almost all of 700km to Kabul.

Throughout, his prose is descriptive and often eloquent: ‘The snow lay heavy on the thin black branches of apple and mulberry trees and formed a thick crust on the drystone walls…The crust glittered with shards of light as though fragments of glass had been scattered over the powder.’

He points out that there were a very large number of faiths in medieval Muslim Asia. ‘In the mountains of western Iran and Iraq there are still Yezidis, whose syncretic faith combines Islam, Zoroastrianism and Christianity and centres around the worship of a fallen angel in the form of a peacock.’ (footnote, p178)  And now, some ten years after this was written, these same Yazidis have been persecuted, massacred and driven from their homes by the deranged adherents of the so-called IS.

He did not carry a detailed map as he didn’t want to be thought a spy. Instead, he obtained letters of introduction from one village head to the next on the route. ‘Day One: Commandant Maududi in Badgah, Day Two: Abdul Rauf Ghafuri in Daulatyar, Day Three and so on…’ He’d recited this regularly, a song-of-the-places-in-between as a map, using the list as credentials. ‘Almost everyone recognised the names…’

Another fine description: ‘By the Hari Rud were tall stands of bushes that resembled dogwood. Their branches were orange and yellow and they rose like stands of flame out of the river ice. Silver trunked willows, too, with dark brown buds and a few pale gold leaves that clattered like cicada wings in the freezing wind. As the snow melted in the sun, the Hari Rud became at first a clean turquoise ice sheet and then a torrent of black-blue water…’ (p224)

There were moments of suspense, when he was accosted by gruff men carrying weapons, wanting to know why he was walking. And there’s humour as well – his first encounter with the dog Babur, and this: ‘They had wrapped their black turbans under their chins and over their ears, framing faces that were lined, tanned and bearded. Villagers don’t wash in the winter. There was a strong smell.’ (p227)

Many of the places he stayed were war-damaged, the people poor. Yet he received the generosity of some feudal chief, and was always glad of the protein to help him through the journey’s ordeal. He understood that meat was very precious and not for a dog… (p229) ‘Everyone was hungry and carried a gun and this was not beneficial for the wildlife.’ (p229) The privation of some is hard to imagine. A chief’s wife stated: ‘I was born in this village. I am the fifth and only surviving wife and I have never been more than an hour’s journey by foot from this village in the forty years that I have been alive.’ (p241)

In his acknowledgement at the front of the book, he expresses his gratitude to the many individuals who helped him, who in fact saved his life, and the book teems with them: ‘… every feudal chief seemed to see it as his obligation to provide me with an escort to the next chief, so that I was being passed like a parcel down the line. These men were willing to walk a full day through the snow to accompany me and then a full day back in the other direction. I always insisted they took some money, but they were clear that they were doing it for me as a traveller and it was sometimes difficult to persuade them to accept.’ (230)

He does not shun away from the terrible toll suffered by the population: ‘Yakawlang had been one of the largest towns in Hazarajat with a literate and politically engaged population.  The Taliban attacked the town in 1998 and executed 400 men against the clinic wall. Since then 75% of the population of Yakawlang had either died or fled.’ (p247)

Magical prose again, this time at sunset: ‘… a chain of frozen lakes. The waterfall had frozen into bloated stalactites, steaked with intense copper oxide green and turquoise blue and sulphur yellow, and creamy with snow where they struck the water. The low sun sank into the straight cleft of the cliff behind me. The coloured alchemy of the ice drained into twilight.’ (p252)

There are poignant moments too, notably when an impromptu musical session is started up in the village: ‘… had not been able to hear music performed in public during the four years of the Taliban regime.’ Eloquent, the sadness of the tune and tone and in the expression of the listeners, ‘and so too was the beauty shared between us.’ (p275)

A superb book from a remarkable man.

*

The Turquoise Mountain Foundation, founded in 2006, is a non-profit, non-governmental organization specializing in urban regeneration, business development, and education in traditional arts and architecture. It provides jobs, skills, and a renewed sense of national pride to Afghan women and men. Rory Stewart was the Executive Chairman until shortly after his election to the UK Parliament in May 2010. The Wikipedia page lists considerable good work that has been done to date (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turquoise_Mountain_Foundation).

FFB: A Reed Shaken by the Wind

Gavin Maxwell is best known for his book Ring of Bright Water. In 1956, he decided to write a book about the marshes of Iraq and joined explorer Wilfred Thesiger to tour round various villages in their canoe, a tarada. Maxwell’s book A Reed Shaken by the Wind (1957) relates his experiences during the seven weeks. Thesiger also carried with him a large medicine chest and administered to many ailments, often rectifying ghastly surgery by itinerants. Towards the end of their tour, Maxwell expressed a wish to own an otter as a pet, and Thesiger found him a baby European otter, which unfortunately died after a week. As he was preparing to go home Maxwell received another otter that Thesiger had obtained. This he named Mijbil and it survived and proved to be a previously unknown sub-species which was named after him, Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli (colloquially, “Maxwell’s Otter”).  His book Ring of Bright Water describes how he raised Mijbil in Camusfearna (Sandaig) on the west coast of Scotland.

The Observer described A Reed Shaken… as ‘a delight when books of travel are written as well as this.’

 

Maxwell’s prose is eloquent and descriptive, laced with humour and poignancy. It was no easy journey through the marshes, either. He was not immune to the depredations of insects. He thought he was merely plagued with fleas, however, he ‘now I realised that I was also lousy, and that two separate armies were fighting for possession of my skin.’

The scenery was remarkable, reeds stretching to the end of the world, it seemed. ‘The earth seemed flat as a plate and stretched away for ever, vast, desolate and pallid: pale bulrush stubble standing in water that reflected a vast pale sky… Wind gusted through the reeds, ruffling the water into flurries of small ripples. A chorus of strange sounds from the stiff withered sedge stumps, groans and whistles, bleats and croaks, and loud crude sounds of flatulence…’

Sounds played an intrusive part, too, whether that was the far-away crying of wild geese, the constant sound of village dogs, or ‘the tumultuous voices of the frogs, turning the marshes into a cauldron of sound,’ unbroken. He would wake to the sound of ‘dogs barking or fighting, or the exuberant quacking of domestic ducks, or the harsh challenge of a cock to the coming day.’

The life of the marsh Arabs has been threatened by civilisation – and some areas have been drained (drainage began as early as the 1960s but accelerated in later decades). And yet one has to wonder at the life they led then: Bilharzia of the marshes was a parasite that ravages the pelvic region of human hosts; they cultivated water buffalo for milk and dung: the latter was gathered by the women only, for it is an unclean task; blood feuds would be settled by the payment of women; water snakes were hated and feared; injuries from the tusks of wild pigs were commonplace. ‘The young girls are often vividly beautiful, with the enormous liquid eyes that have been so often compared to those of a gazelle, a delicate golden skin, and hair that – when not dyed with henna and twisted into an ugly elaboration of many short plaits – is usually arranged in a short fringe over the forehead, fine blue-black, and gently waving…’ Later their faces may be disfigured by scars from the disease known as Baghdad boil. And then their faces are tattooed…

Accommodation and ablutions were not to be envied. The houses were made of reeds, cemented with dung and mud. In one house he slept while ‘swarms of bats flitted among the dim columns above, casting huge upward shadows on the arch-tops.’ And in another village he lay down to sleep ‘with a buffalo at my head, her warm breath stirring my hair…’

Water buffaloes are the marsh-man’s economy and life revolves around them. Maintained for their milk and their dung – they drink the milk sour or as curds or make butter churned by swinging the milk rhythmically in the suspended and dried skin of a sheep or a still-born calf. Dung is used for fuel and water-proofing. Dung fire smoulders with a smoke dense, acrid and suffocating.  Men sit on the leeward side of the fire to avoid streaming eyes.

The buffaloes were well cared for, and ate green reed shoots – hashish, literally grass - at night.

Wild pig was the most common animal in the marshes: ‘… a raging tornado of slashing tusks that rip the flesh like knives and leave white bone open to the sky.’ If the victim fell on his back, he was likely to die if gored – suffering often fatal injury to face, throat and stomach; if he lay on his face, he just might have survived. Many villagers carried scars of past gorings.

 
Celebrations could involve weddings, engagements, dancing, and births. Sometimes celebrations got out of hand, such as letting off a great brass-bound muzzle-loading shot-gun, blasting at the ceiling of the house. ‘The report was followed by a long shower of broken reeds and debris; then, in a moment of dead silence, a large bat fell with a clang on to the coffee pots.’ Later, after more celebrating, the lantern was turned out, ‘and the fire became trodden under by the stamping feet, and the darkness was punctuated only by the flash of the guns, each followed by a spatter of loose fragments from above. When it was all over there were a great many holes in the roof, and everyone got rather wet during the night…’ But the celebrations had been a great success!
 
At the time, Iraqi national service was compulsory. They’d draft dodge by paying a neighbour to borrow a child who is obviously below the requisite age, and this child impersonated the boy called up. The recruiter accepted this; however, when he returned in two years’ time, when another child had been borrowed, sometimes the substitute child was even younger! ‘The official expresses wonder and amazement at the ingenuous Peter Pan, and a dispute begins’… which was resolved with a little money changing hands.
 
A fascinating book in many ways of a time gone by, written with an excellent style: ‘During the slow icy hours between midnight and dawn, hours when the brain may sometimes outrun the plodding of reason and escape from habitual and safe corridors of thought to catch perilous glimpses of truth, some part of me was trying to interpret and give meaning to my presence here in the night and the cold on the bank of a strange river.’
 
No need to ponder the reason for living; simply delve in and wonder at the hardship of the marsh Arabs of Iraq last century.
 
Maxwell died of cancer in 1965, aged 55.
 
Notes:
Maxwell’s book Lords of the Atlas: The Rise and Fall of the House of Glaoua, 1893-1956 (1966) is a fascinating look at the history and politics of Morocco during that period.

Wilfred Thesiger’s book Desert, Marsh and Mountain (1979) is a compilation of his travels and may be of interest to armchair explorers and travellers too.

Displaced Nation

Wikipedia commons - full sunburst over the earth

No, I’m not writing an apocalyptic sci-fi story about a country cast adrift amidst the Islets of Langerhans… This post is about an interesting blog relating to expats with a creative bent.

I’ve been an expat writer for 11 years, ever since my wife and I left England for the Costa Blanca. The beauty of being a freelance writer is that the work can be done almost anywhere and at any time. Naturally, there may be commitments, deadlines occasionally – but they’re self-imposed. Nobody tells me to write. I do it because I am driven to write.

The popular image of expat writers is probably an author sitting on a balcony with the sun blazing, the sky a brilliant azure, the garden a riot of colour, the typewriter clacking away next to the tray of drinks… The truth is more prosaic: working at a computer keyboard indoors, perhaps with an infrequent stroll in the garden to avoid DVT; and of course alcohol and creativity don’t mix too well, either.

Expat writers the world over can and do gain insight into their adopted countries, using the once-removed perspective of an outsider looking in. And their writing can be most enlightening.

Which brings me to a fascinating blog entitled The Displaced Nation. Its sub-title is ‘A home for International Creatives’. In its first four years of existence it has built up an impressive array of features, interviews, and columns.  One of these is the location-locution column:

http://thedisplacednation.com/category/cool-columns/location-locution-cool-columns/

Browse through the earlier interviews and you’ll be transported to far-flung places – China, Germany, and Switzerland for example. They’re the expat writers, scribes with wanderlust, but you can also read about artists and photographers in another column. In fact, there’s plenty here to grab your attention for quite a while; take a look.

http://thedisplacednation.com/about-us/