Merinder's House

Travel writing, if indeed such a thing exists, is rarely what its title suggests, and perhaps it should be redefined. If it is a journey from A to B, with all the places and people stacked neatly on their shelves with a set of facts and statistics, then perhaps it is little more than painting by numbers. If it is a description of people in their generic state, then it is simply a romanticisation of the mundane.

If it is an account of a good old boy’s journey to intrepid places, funded through a series of adept social connections, it is all too often a monologue about how cleverly they coped with the inadequacies of other cultures or adapted in a naively Darwinesque sort of way to the parts the developed world considers good about them. And if it is a commentary on social and political injustice – worthy though it might be – it is no more than reporting.

What is left? I would argue that what remains are the early adventurers and explorers, some of whom were less than scrupulous in their ambitions and how they obtained their material, and commentaries made in passing by writers whose quest was different from the road itself – perhaps a journal of someone looking for flowers, who incidentally stumbled on a country. Finally, and best of all, what is left is Bruce Chatwin and the storytellers, and if their work is to be valued properly, I am not sure it can be called travel writing at all.

They write about journeys of a different kind, in words which do not describe the road. They describe feet that cannot stop walking and personal obsessions which will continue whether anyone is listening or not. They are not egotistical journeys, and are not seeking the attention of the reader. In fact, they are not written with the reader in mind at all.

Instead, they are poetic commentaries and rhythms which never quite end, and rarely have a physical destination. They mention oddities in passing, mostly people who do not quite fit into their landscape, and they have a horror of the mundane. Most of all, they are wonderful stories, and very soon into the narrative, we do not care whether they really happened or not. If the story is worth its salt, it will be a journey of a different kind.

Jane Coutts, who recently wrote Merinder’s House, Scottish fiction with a European flavour.