Book review: Granta 138/Journeys

Granta`s offering for the yet-to-arrive winter of 2017, Journeys, juxtaposes a fine set of travel writings with brief succint takes on whether travel writing is dead,  by the likes of Ian Jack, Colin Thubron, Pico Iyer, Samanth Subramanian, Geoff Dyer, Mohsin Hamid and co.

The writings run the gamut of stories, essays, observations, photographs,  the usual Granta staple. William Atkins` account of the border ourt in Arizona that tries illegal Mexican border-crossers, is a particularly affecting one, as is Xan Rice`s memoir essay on a return visit to his school in South Africa; he had been in school during the watershed years of apartheid and was now visiting well after the segregation walls had broken down.

The on-point takes on The Question du jour are both personal and impersonal, dryly witty and earnestly serious, but almost all spell out the answer: no, travel writing is not dead, thank you.

The redoubtable Robert Macfarlane, in his reply to the q, talks of three well-known travel writers who each describe a sunset in his/her own way.

Here is Bruce Chatwin`s sunset:

In a brick-red sunset I came to the cottage of  a German. he lived with a scrawny Indian boy.

Here is John McPhee`s sunset:

The air was cool now, nearing fifty…we sat around the campfire for at least another hour. We talked of rain and kestrels, oil and antlers, the height and the headwaters of the river. in the night the air and the river balanced out, and both were forty-six at seven in the morning.

Then, here is Anna Shepherd`s sunset:

The intense frost, the cloudless sky, the white world, the setting sun and the rising moon, as we gazed on them from the slope of Morrone, melted into a prismatic radiation of blue, yellow, muave and rose. The full moon floated up into green light; and as the rose and violet hues spread over snow and sky, the colour seemed to live its own life, to have body and resilience, as though we were not looking at it, but were inside its substance. 

Is travel writing dead? Well, Pico Iyer rues that anecdote is fast replacing analysis and blogs that read like children`s What I Did On My Summer Holiday` essays are supplanting the kind of piercing, rigorously researched, fearless descriptions that acknowledge that places are at least as alive as people are. And then,  Iyer goes on to say that all of this doesn`t mean travel writing is dead; only that we sometimes are.

How`s that for an excellent exit cue?!