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The Liquid Continent: A Mediterranean Trilogy. Volume I: Alexandria

Cities of the coast

Nicholas Woodsworth
Armchair Traveller, 199pp, ££12.99,

Jonathan Keates

Wednesday, 14th May 2008

Jonathan Keates on a trilogy of travel books

In the days when English counties were untouched by the dead hand of central government rationalisation, odd little chunks of them used to fetch up in neighbouring shires, appearing as little green or brown blobs, defiantly labelled ‘part of Leicestershire’ or ‘part of Somerset’. The Mediterranean sometimes seems like a larger version of this topographical oddity. Officially it is part of the Atlantic, an awkward remnant of what was formerly a vast marine depression stretching far into central Asia. But who beside its shores has felt depressed for very long? The Atlantic is where we go for granite and fog, grey waves and annihilating icebergs, to be overwhelmed by ‘l’immense démence de la mer’, as Victor Hugo called it. The Mediterranean, on the other hand, as we sidle into it through the Straits of Gibraltar, persuades us, by its millennial evidence of human creativity, imagination and ingenuity, that we are little less than gods.

Nicholas Woodsworth is a Canadian journalist married to a Frenchwoman and living in Aix-en-Provence, not exactly beside the great inland sea but sufficiently vulnerable to what he terms the goat’s-cheese-and-lavender school of writing about maritime Provence. Leaving France behind (even rackety old Marseilles, as irrepressibly Mediterranean a spot as you could find, apparently won’t do for a departure point) Woodsworth prepares to start his tour of ‘the Liquid Continent’ on a train to Alexandria.

Curiosity is what makes him a bona fide traveller and saves him from instant disenchantment with the city when he arrives. For Alexandria is the classic casualty of postwar nationalism, a polyglot Levantine society whose febrile essence was vindictively shattered by the Suez crisis, leaving nothing very much to take its place.

Shaped from a Macedonian conqueror’s Homeric dream, the ancient birthplace of geometry, geography and literary criticism, the capital of the Ptolemies has become just another scruffy, overpopulated Middle Eastern conurbation, with grimly generic apartment blocks where villas and palaces once stood.

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