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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

Woodsworth’s Alexandrian guides are not of the usual pyramids-for-baksheesh variety. A French archaeologist named Elizabeth Hairy interprets the mysteries of the earthquake-toppled Pharos as an antique pathway to heaven, Joseph, a dodgy Lancastrian Brit, having unearthed the city’s single surviving Greek brothel madam for the author’s inspection, takes him on a nocturnal church crawl, and Mimi Awad, half-Orthodox, half-Muslim, introduces him to what is left of cosmopolitan bon ton, ‘stirring up the settled dregs of once lavish and decadent lives’ with the crumbling shell of Lawrence Durrell’s villa for a backdrop.

‘No matter what the age’, Woodsworth concludes, ‘all Alexandrians gaze behind themselves in longing’. Among the most distinguished of them was St Mark, who ended up under the high altar of his eponymous Venetian basilica after medieval merchants smuggled his body out of Egypt wrapped in pork to deter Muslim customs inspectors. We are at least 100 pages into Woodsworth’s Venice volume before he himself arrives on the Rialto, having dawdled in Aleppo, Latakia and Ankara en route. A reluctant cultural tourist, he slogs dutifully round churches and galleries, but is far more interested in boating on the lagoon among the topi, sandali and caorline than in the beauties of Titian and Veronese. The city proves too dinkily parochial for his taste, so he hurries south to Ancona in search of a ferry to whisk him back inside the confines of the old Ottoman empire.

The Liquid Continent’s final volume is much the most enjoyable. By now the writer has got into his stride and decided who he is in relation to the unfathomable complexity of his theme. On his way to Istanbul he delights in Albania as an ideal manifestation of the ‘screw-you-Jack, what’s-it-to-me unruliness of the Levant’ and tries without success to avoid mentioning the ‘L’ word on the island the Greeks would much rather we didn’t call Lesbos. To history’s habit of encroaching on his Mediterranean travels at the slightest opportunity he reacts with a surprise which is positively touching. At least some of the pleasure afforded by these three books derives from Woodsworth’s frankly acknowledged ignorance of the Levantine past. He fetches up in Istanbul, that Mediterranean Alpha-et-Omega, apparently knowing nothing of Byzantium, the Ottomans, the Dardanelles campaign or the 1922 Greek invasion of Turkey but refreshingly ready to shoulder the corresponding burdens of enlightenment.

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