Still roughing it

We are all tourists now, and there is no escape. The first thing we see as we jet round the world is a filth of our own making. Resort hotel seepage. Takeaway detritus. Travel, in its pre-package sense, can no longer be said to exist. Airports even have ‘comfort zones’ with dental clinics, cinemas and (at New York’s JFK) funeral parlours.

Some travel writers, desperate to simulate the hardship of Victorian travel, have imposed artificial difficulties on themselves. The late Eighties saw a glut of such daft titles as Hang-Gliding to Borneo and To Bognor on a Rhinoceros. In every case, however, it would have been quicker to take the train. Why windsurf across the Mojave when there’s a decent coach service? The genre was revived somewhat in 1983, when Granta issued the first of its fashionable ‘Travel Writing’ issues. Norman Lewis, James Fenton and other left-leaning authors exploited the narrative devices of fiction to forge an incisively brilliant reportage.

Three decades on, Granta continues to tap the travel market, yet notably few risks are taken with lesser-known writers. Subsequent travel anthologies have included Bruce Chatwin, Jonathan Raban, Paul Theroux, Redmond O’Hanlon, Colin Thubron and Ryszard Kapucinski. All of them established authors, all of them brilliant. Now we have The New Granta Book of Travel. Unfortunately the same six travel authors are included: what is ‘new’ in that? The conservative nature of the anthology is a sign perhaps that Granta knows its readership; yet the impression of a charmed circle remains.

Fortunately there are some newcomers. Lavinia Greenlaw conjures a haunting poetry in her piece on the snow-bound immensity of the Arctic Circle. John Borneman, an American caught up in the Sri Lanka tsunami over Christmas 2004, gives a knuckle-whitening account of the disaster and its aftermath.