Bryson in Australia

Citizen Reader has a book menage (that is to say, online book club/discussion event) kicking off next week. The theme is travel books and up for discussion are two Oceani- related books, In A Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson and Blue Latitudes by Tony Horwitz. I had both of these books in my house, so I was quite happy to have an incentive to read them. The Bryson book has been sitting around here so long I had forgotten and picked up the book at the library.

I was quite taken with the Bryson book. He is as much a humorist as he is a travel writer, reminding me of PJ O'Rourke from his Holidays in Hell days. He gets a lot of mileage from the deadly fauna of the region and the Australian nonchalance towards the creatures, aside from crocs which apparently scare the hell out of them as well. The northern part of the country is famous for odd characters and Bryson finds them. Friendly and odd in Queensland, rude and odd in Darwin.

He also makes me want to go to Australia, badly. He paints a picture of a place with friendly people, incredible sights, beautiful cities and nature has to be seen to be believed. I wasn't aware that there are plants in the northern Cape York peninsula that have long been thought extinct. One was found when it was sickening cattle. Contingency has played a part in the natural history of Australia as well. He tells the story of one scientist who stopped for lunch and stumbled upon a fossil that filled in a vital gap in the historical record. Australia is so big and empty that much else is likely still to be found.

Bryson had a lot of time in Australia and that (and the cost of course) is one thing that holds me back from going. I could see myself getting a week there, which would mean I would most likely be spending it in and around Sydney. A great city, from what I can see, but it doesn't seem enough to get me to take the 24 hour plane ride. I would however be keen on a trip to the Great Barrier Reef, as long as my dive boat didn't leave me out there.

The ends of the earth

For a generally sad book, Simon Winchester's The Sun Never Sets (recently republished as Outposts) is certainly a fun read. In the 80s, Winchester got the idea to travel to the remaining pieces of the British Empire. Most of them are nearly unknown (Trista da Cunha anyone?) and tiny. At the time, Hong Kong was a colony, but the remainder are small indeed, which makes for interesting stories of forlorn little places like St. Helena and, in some regards, Gibraltar.

What makes the book so enjoyable is Winchester's prose which swerves from nostalgic to wistful to acid. Here he mocks the Gibraltar Rock Apes, famous due to the legend that as long as they stay on the Rock, so shall Britain:

But here they still sit, begging for food on the Monkey's Alameda, swinging from wall to tree to tourist shoulder, spitting, lunging, hawking, puking, and displaying their unpleasant and oddly tailess backsides to the daily busloads of the curious. They are truly loathsome creatures, in a state of permanent distemper, ogrous packages of green and grey fur, all teeth, stale fruit and urine. How little these true barbarians know of the solicitous tendresse to which they are subject, or the colonial telegrams that have passed to and from the Gibraltar cable station, attesting to their contentment, or their decline.

Great stuff for travel fans, but Imperial fans in particular.

AA Gill is Awesome

There are some travel writers, like Rory Stewart of the Places in Between fame, who focus so little on themselves that they seem to vanish from the page. AA Gill is not one of those writers. His giant personality, opinion and humor threaten to crowd out whatever subject is at hand. When he is focused he can be quite acerbic, although generally in a witty manner. In AA Gill is Away, his takes on Japan (populated by aliens who are trying hard to look human) and Germany (the section is titled Hunforgiven) flirt with offensiveness, but the humor wins out.

You can tell when he is truly angry when the humor disappears. He thunders at the pharmaceutical industry for it's limited investment in tropical medicines as he watches a Ugandan girl undergo a spinal tap and a Uganda boy take arsenic based medicine to test for and treat sleeping sickness. This and his harrowing visit to a Sudanese refugee camp are highlights of the book.

It's not just multinational corporations that get his goat, it is also communism. While I have read of the tragedy of the disappearing Aral Sea (bad economic policy managed to kill the fourth largest lake in the world,) Gill shows the terrible effects on the people still living there.

It's not all doom and gloom though. Gill also manages to convince a pornographic film company to let him write an adult film and goes to see it shot. The story is hilarious but also told quite straight. His treatment of the actors as real people alone sets the story apart.

This recent restaurant review will give you a sense of whether you will like his writing. Here are many more. Here is an enjoyable interview with Gill on restaurants and food.

Nazis and Pornstars and Gangstas, Oh My!

Louis Theroux apparently had a show in Britain on which he would interview bizarre subcult figures in the USA. Crazy Yanks and all that. He eventually followed up with a number of his subjects and collected his experiences in Call of the Weird. He does get a nice sampling of fringers, including Deep South Gangsta rappers, UFO cultists, Ike Turner, pornstars, prostitutes, Nazis of a few flavors, including teen sensations Prussian Blue, and pyramid scheme fleece artists. I'm sad he missed out on the eco-freaks of the Pacific Northwest and the cable access performers. Portland alone is chock full of nuts including the late lamented Jim Spagg.

The book could just be a cataloging of the odd, but this one works because of the vulnerabilities of the characters and Theroux's sympathetic treatment of them. Theroux clearly wants to find these people again and see what happened to them. In many cases, they have left their former trade, such as Earth Defender (vs. UFOs) or prostitution for new means of support. None of these people have particularly nice lives. Most people would consider the people he meets as freaks, but he helps us see them as people. Horribly deluded people in most cases, but people nonetheless.

The topics won't appeal to everyone. The porn chapter is a bit explicit, but what will really get people are the full kickin' racists. These aren't the casual racists that tell a rude joke when drinking, but the kind preparing for the race war. Theroux lightens the mood with humor, ( one of the skinheads has a bumper sticker that says "My Boss is an Austrian painter"--- sure it's evil, but I laughed.) but humor only goes so far with people with views this repugnant.

All in all, a fun read for those fascinated by those who follow REALLY different drummers. Europeans may shake their heads and mutter about Americans, but come on, there are 300 million of us. There have to be some outliers in there somewhere.