Spiritual Enlightenment in a Travel Book

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/news/article6945101.ece
Anthony Sattin

The prophets of doom should fall silent: this has been an excellent year for new travel writing, including books by authors who made their name with travel, then moved to other genres. William Dalrymple hasn’t written a travel book in a decade, but Nine Lives (Bloomsbury £20) sees him in India, following pilgrims and searchers of spiritual enlightenment.

Each of the “lives” in the title is a story from a different religion or cult — a Buddhist monk, a Jain nun, a Brahmin idol-maker and so on. Dalrymple’s storytelling skills and eye for the bizarre and exotic make this a fascinating and entertaining window onto spiritual India.

A couple of years ago, Jan Morris published what she said was her last book, but she has raised the curtain once more with Contact! (Faber £15). This collection of paragraph-long recollections, taken from 50 years of encounters, is both hypnotic and suggestive. Some of them are inconsequential, but many have the power to conjure up both character and place.

There’s an equally eclectic collection of characters to be found in Bicycle Diaries (Faber £15), by the former Talking Heads front man David Byrne. He began riding around New York in the 1980s, but here he also describes encounters in Istanbul, Manila and other bike-hostile cities. Byrne writes at greater length than Morris, and with just as sharp an eye and as lively a sense of humour.
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A bicycle sits at the heart of Andrew Eames’s Blue River, Black Sea (Bantam £18), which is unexpected, as he is following the Danube. Eames also follows the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who walked across Europe in the 1930s. Wanting to see what remains of old Europe, he proves himself both witty and willing, and his tale, while not as elegantly told as Fermor’s, makes for fascinating armchair reading.

Peter Ackroyd has been a passionate chronicler of London, most recently with his bestselling book on the Thames, but he has now written Venice: Pure City (Chatto & Windus £25). The city’s history has been well told often enough, and Ackroyd’s TV spin-off delivers no revelations, but it is a lively, learned, warts-and-all portrait of a place most of us tend to glamorise.

Life on an Aegean island also tends to get glamorised, but not in Dmetri Kakmi’s autobiographical novel. Mother Land (Eland £17) may take us back to the innocence of summery days in the early 1960s, with wine-dark seas, dusty lanes and big feasts, but the idyll is riven by tensions between Greeks and Turks, and between a sophisticated mother and a fisherman father. Beautifully told, sensitively observed and painfully poignant, this is a gorgeous memoir of an island life that is now lost to us.

Finally, two photographic books stand out from the decorative pack. Los Angeles (Taschen £45) is a suitably outsize, 572-page celebration of the city where big and bold are best. By contrast, the slender, elegant Desert Songs (AUC £30), by Arita Baaijens, is a beautiful, evocative record of three journeys across Egypt and Sudan, with several short, fascinating essays on life in the sands.