AsiaLIFE

In his first column for AsiaLIFE, William Bagley gives some tips for quality reading, whether or not you decide to go travelling this hot season. All books are available at Monument Books.

 A Time of Gifts – Patrick Leigh Fermor

Between Woods and Water – Patrick Leigh Fermor

A Fortune-teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East – Tiziano Terzani

I Have Seen the World Begin: Travels Through China, Cambodia and Vietnam – Carsten Jensen

Right now I’d feel a lot more confident about taking a holiday if some fresh calamity in the financial markets wasn’t being announced every week. So this year I plan to take refuge in some quality travel writing – you know, something with a bit more insight than the who, what and why of hitchhiking round Ireland with a refrigerator. I’d never heard of Rose Mahoney before but in the past she has written about China, Ireland and pilgrimages to Christian and Hindu sacred sites. Her latest is called ‘Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff.’ This is a book that inspires and not just to go down the Nile. She juxtaposes an account of her own palm-blistering hours on the Nile with the diary entries of two Victorian travellers – Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale – to great effect. Nightingale was well versed in Egyptian history while Flaubert’s interests lay more in visiting bathhouses and prostitutes. “I performed on a mat that a family of cats had to be shooed off,” he famously said. Mahoney’s writing is richly evocative of the sights and smells of Egypt, and she has an eye for vivid and startling detail. She also finds time to give insight to the attitudes of the traditional Egyptian male as well as the frustration felt by the women she meets – at the end of her meeting with two of the best described female characters in the book, one says, “Rose, I tell you. I wish I could be free like you.”

I was happy to discover that Patrick Leigh Fermor’s books on his pre-Second World War walk from London to Constantinople were in print again. Leigh Fermor has always been considered among the greats – Lewis, Murphy, Newby – but I think ‘A Time of Gifts’ and ‘Between Woods and Water’ transcend the genre. His writing verges on the poetic, even magical. Reading them again now make me yearn to have been born in a different era. If you’ve never come across them before, seek them out now – you will not be disappointed. Your main problem will be that he has still to publish the third and final volume in the planned trilogy. Closer to home, I’d never come across ‘A Fortune-teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East’ by Tiziano Terzani or ‘I Have Seen the World Begin: Travels Through China, Cambodia and Vietnam’ by Carsten Jensen but both come highly recommended. I reckon I’ll hunker down and forget about a holiday and let some quality reading transport me instead.