![The late, great writer Jonathan Raban](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2023/01/19/TELEMMGLPICT000322393965_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwbq5v-5dkpJ2hEWYppeJOq0.jpeg?imwidth=680)
'I see a journey as a scale-model of life' – the late Jonathan Raban on his favourite travel books
What makes a good travel book? Here Jonathan Raban, who died this week, explains what separates the mediocre from the great
![The late, great writer Jonathan Raban](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2023/01/19/TELEMMGLPICT000322393965_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwbq5v-5dkpJ2hEWYppeJOq0.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Jonathan Raban died this week at the age of 80. This article was originally published in 2000.
Travel books are stories; no one seems to know this, but they are. In other words, they make a pattern from, and find meaning in, the ordinary chaos and debris of life. Journeys themselves – short walks across the Hindu Kush, kayaking through Oceania, hiking through Patagonia – are meaningless; mere dollops of experience, however fun, arduous, frustrating, interesting they may have been for the traveller at the time. But the narratives to which they give rise are something else – shapely, plotted, full of significance, like novels whose precipitating events have actually taken place.
Think of Bruce Chatwin, the quintessential "travel writer" of recent years. Chatwin was a mythopoeic writer; he found in his own life and travels the raw material for the making of myths – chief among them, the myth of himself as a solitary nomad, wandering, and pondering, the globe. In fact (as Nicholas Shakespeare's excellent biography makes clear), Chatwin was such a compulsive talker that he was incapable of travelling alone for more than a few hours at a time. He picked people up to bend their ears.
In Patagonia, he picked up a backpacking Australian couple, too dim to appreciate their good fortune in being selected by Chatwin as confidants for his torrent of bright remarks. In Australia, he had Salman Rushdie, who found him excellent company, even making all allowances for Chatwin's world-class talent for non-stop name-dropping. The Australian couple doesn't show up in In Patagonia, and Salman Rushdie makes no appearance in The Songlines. The books that Chatwin wrote are not simple transcriptions of the travels that Chatwin made, and only naive readers will feel cheated by that discovery.
True, some travel books are literal logs of the journey made by the traveller: Gipsy Moth Circles the World by Francis Chichester; Annapurna South Face by Chris Bonington; Shackleton's South. But these journeys were more important in themselves than almost anything that the traveller could say about them. The fact that he – or she – made the journey at all is reason enough for the reader to pick up the book. That Chatwin went to Patagonia, or Thubron to Siberia, or Theroux circled most of the world on elderly steam trains is of interest to no one. You probably did it yourself. Or your next-door-but-one neighbour did. You read these books not for the travels described in them (which anyone could have made, given the time and the tickets) but for the story spun from the travels by the writer. You don't read Patagonia; you read Chatwin. You don't read Trains; you read Theroux.
I see a journey as a scale-model of life. You're given three – or six – months to live. Between your departure and your return, everything that happens is of potential significance, and it is up to you to somehow spin what happens into narrative. The travel book is a perfect form for the paranoid imagination, for it challenges the writer to see every event along the road as being part of a plot. What did it mean? Where does it fit? Why did it happen then? It's only in the writing that the inchoate mess of the journey itself begins to take shape, and tell the writer – who was once the traveller – what it was really about.
!["Compulsive talker" Bruce Chatwin](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2023/01/19/TELEMMGLPICT000042684198_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqWZZ9520Qrn8RyVs0byqFfymqy_qNHx9smJQdyZJhsFQ.jpeg?imwidth=350)
The writer and the traveller are two distinct characters. The traveller, never knowing what is going to happen next, is in the dark – a journeying fool, as we all are, on the larger journey, which is life itself. But the writer, sitting at his desk – as it were, posthumously – knows how the journey turned out. He foresees the end. He can watch his hapless alter ego, caught in the toils of the plot, and feel a twinge of pity for him, because he knows that something truly bad is waiting for the traveller, just over the next hill, or round the next bend in the river.
For me, the best "travel books" (Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey, Alexander Kinglake's Eothen, Evelyn Waugh's Labels, Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana, W G Sebald's The Rings of Saturn) are all at heart autobiographical novels. They are true – insofar as the journey really happened, as did all the ascertainable events along the way – but they are also imagined, shaped, patterned, plotted. They make lasting sense of the contingency and chaos of the trip. Like Chatwin's books, they're best read as myths, not literal records, and the reader who goes searching for those Australians in Patagonia, or for Rushdie in the Outback, is off on a journey of his own, up the wrong track.
![Evelyn Waugh](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/travel/2023/01/19/TELEMMGLPICT000274458988_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqixEgqfChNs4_-GdZRo9Cc3tMPzXoAshcT_sDvUc7HwU.jpeg?imwidth=350)
I admire Kinglake, who in his preface to Eothen boasted that the book contained nothing "useful" at all; no hints and tips, no essential facts, nothing of practical value to the future visitor to the Middle East. We are now copiously supplied with travelling information by television, guidebooks, the "Travel" sections of newspapers like this one. The literary travel book has a different function. It's there to succour the imagination with a story, and to create for the reader a new (one might say novel) world, made palpable on the page.