Customer Reviews

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

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Graham Greene is a famous 20th C novelist ("The Orient Express") who also wrote a few travel accounts. This is his first, when he was 31 years old and left Europe for the first time in his life to experience the uncivilized "dark heart of Africa" by traveling through the back country of Liberia in 1935. It was a 4-week, 350-mile walk, mostly through an unchanging tunnel forest path, ending each day in a primitive village. He had about a dozen black porters who would carry him in a sling, although he walked much of the way.

It's written with a very "old school" perspective, with one foot in the 19th (or 18th) century of romantic colonial imperialism, and one foot in the pre-war 1930s perspective of deterioration, rot and things falling apart. Heavy whiskey drinking, descriptions of the festering diseases of the natives, and plethora of bothersome insects, the run down European outposts and a motley cast of white rejects fill many descriptive pages.

It reminds me a lot of Samuel Johnson's "Journals of the Western Isles" (1770s) when Johnson, who had never left England in his life, decided to go to Scotland to see what uncivilized people were like. Just as Johnson brought Boswell who would go on to write his own version of the trip, Greene brought his female cousin Barbara Greene (who remains unnamed in the book and largely unmentioned), who went on to write her own version of the trip in the 1970s called "Too Late to Turn Back", which mostly contradicts Grahams version.

I can't say I totally enjoyed this book, I found Greene's attitude irritating - but therein lies its value, as a snapshot of prewar European zeitgeist. It is reminiscent of "Kabloona" (1940), another prewar travel account to an uncivilized place (Arctic Eskimos) by a young European aristocrat, who also is deeply inward looking and finds a new perspective and appreciation for the "cave man" people he meets. It's very much a transition period between prewar and post-war attitudes and the fluctuation's back and forth, the sense of things falling apart, but also new-found perspective, make it a challenging but interesting work.

Graham Greene was weary and appalled by the world atrocities of the early 20th century. He decided to go looking for life as basic and unspoiled as it was in the beginning. He chose to do so in Liberia, the African nation that had always been under black rule and not colonized or fleeced by Europe in modern times, though even it was a western construct, carved out of the continent by Americans as a homeland to repatriate freed slaves (or, as Greene says, a place to hide mulatto offspring). His trek on foot lasted the month of February 1935, and JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS is his account of what became a transformative experience.

The title is derived from the fact that there were no true maps available of Liberia at the time. He relied on a caravan of native porters and a lot of guestimations as to what direction and how far it would be from village to village. Once leaving the ragged European communities near the coast, he and his party plunged into that virgin world he sought. What he describes in exquisite detail is now familiar to us via decades of National Geographics but was then, to someone who had never left Europe at that point, a culture shock. He learned to leave behind his English insistence on time table and surprise at naked, ritually scarred bodies, the persistent sound of drums and the utter poverty of villages. He did not let go his own clothes or whiskey or discomfort over rats and insects. He is eventually waylaid by sickness, and in the healing process comes out with a new, more life affirming personal vision. Though it seems as if the details of the daily marches, the insects and discomforts are so much of the same, by the end you see the impact of the experience. He found what he went looking for and more, and he was not afraid to leave some mysteries unsolved.

Greene's prose is clear as a bell and graceful. His observations of contemporary politics and missionaries, as well as the elasticity of truth in such a setting are valuable today, even seasoned with his candid biases.

Not an adventure when compared to fictional safari tales in which the intrepid travellers fight off fierce lions and savage "natives" in every chapter. Instead, an enjoyable and realistic account of Greene's arduous and near-disasterous trek through Liberia. Greene travelled with his cousin, Barbara Greene, who also wrote an account of their journey--Too Late to Turn Back. Interesting contrasts between the two books if you can find copies of both. I had to order a copy of Barbara's book from a used book store in England.

I've read a number of Greene's novels, but this little travel book was equal to his other publications. As usual, his attention to detail, people, and culture creates wonderful images that bring us right to the Liberia of the 1930s. I shared the book with my sister who lived in Liberia for 27 yrs. and she was astonished at the accurate reporting. His prose is the best I've read for a book devoted to travel experiences.

In 1935, Graham Greene, hoping to find the human "heart of darkness", embarked on an ambitious (foolhardy?) expedition into unmapped Liberia. JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS is the book he wrote when he returned. More than simply a travel journal, it stands tall amongst both English travel literature and Graham Greene's works.

Greene traveled with his female cousin, Barbara Greene (who also wrote a book on the expedition, "Too Late to Turn Back"). From Freetown, in Sierra Leone (then a British colony), they traveled by rail to near the border with Liberia. Then, with a few native servants and about 25 native carriers, they trekked 350 miles across northeastern Liberia and then southwest to the coast, arriving in Grand Bassa four weeks later. Along the way they encountered and endured heat, torpor, and myriads of cockroaches, ants, spiders, jiggers, and rats. They also witnessed exotic native life and customs, particularly the dances of masked devils, and they were exposed to some of the mysteries of the secret bush societies. But they were equally a novel curiosity to many of the villagers they met, who would gather around the open hut provided them at the end of a day's march:

"There was nothing you could do without their noticing it; to draw a handkerchief from the pocket caused a craning of necks. It worked a little on the nerves, this constant stare; but you had to recognize the superiority of their attitude over the white man's to something strange. We were as good as a circus; they had no wish to stuff us or skin us or put us in cages."

Greene is particularly good in his commentary (critical, of course) on European colonialism - though at the time Liberia was one of only two political entities on the African continent not ruled directly by whites (Abyssinia was the other).

The book fails, inevitably, in its effort to plumb the depths of the human psyche, which seems to be the underlying reason that Greene, having evidently had some recent personal experience with psychoanalysis, undertook the trip. Realizing (and this was even before the outbreak of WWII) "what unhappiness, * * * what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us", Greene wanted to discover "from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray." There is something odd and maybe dated about such faith in the psychoanalysis of homo sapiens. Even though Greene discovered no all-explanatory secrets on his venture into the Liberian heart of darkness, he did not return home altogether empty. JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS contains various and sundry observations about humanity and the human condition that are percipient and/or provocative. Greene also discovered some things about himself, as reflected in the following: "I had discovered in myself a passionate interest in living. I had always assumed before, as a matter of course, that death was desirable."

Much of the writing serves as a splendid example of slightly ornate British prose. On the whole JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS is one of the better, and more literate, travel books that I have read. It also holds up very well with the passage of time.

ADDENDUM (20 Sept. 2011): In 2009 journalist and author Tim Butcher re-traced the trek across Liberia of Graham and Barbara Greene, which formed the basis for his recent book "Chasing the Devil". Butcher's book contains a wealth of background information about Greene's expedition, including the fact that he was on a fact-finding mission of sorts on behalf of The Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society. I highly recommend "Chasing the Devil", especially for those who enjoyed reading JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS.

In 1935, in the first flush of success of his first acclaimed novel, Greene took off to explore the concept of Africa, building on his notions of adventure from childhood reading. Identifying never-colonized Liberia as the most authentically uncivilized of African destinations, he set off, with his 23-year-old female cousin, a troop of native bearers and virtually no knowledge or experience of trekking. His four weeks of walking a twelve-inch path through the Liberian wilds, stopping at villages overnight, makes an interesting and engaging account, never sentimentalized, and with much thoughtful insight. He gives plentiful narrative detail, but always is overwhelmingly concerned with the psychic reverberations of Africa, and his perceptions of primitivism, in his own life and outlook. He is not unaware of the irony of his deliberate quest for un-self-consciousness flowing from external reflections on the "natural" human world. This book is an interesting counterpoint to observations of modern-day Liberia, for which progress over the ensuing seven decades remains elusive. A few more of the roads have been paved, but most of the country remains bare soil, now soaked in more blood and mayhem than the quaint natives and masked, raffia-skirted tribal "devils" of 1935 could have dreamed of.

It's with no little trepidation that I confess to finding little to enjoy in this book. Over many years, I have read much of Graham Greene's work and hold it in high esteem, but I had to struggle to finish this real-life tale of his 1936 journey to Liberia.

Greene accurately and vividly describes his hardships hiking through a brutal climate and coping with extremely primitive conditions in a wild, disease ridden part of the globe. As an adventure tale about a relative neophyte making his way in a harsh landscape, this book has real value. Greene vividly describes the poverty and disease that surrounds him throughout most of his trip.

Yet even given its obvious virtues, I have two substantial problems with this book:

* Greene has little interest in the culture or religion of the people he meets in Liberia.
* The prose seems unnecessarily dense, obscure and complex.

It is perhaps unfair to criticize Greene for not having more interest in anthropology, yet ancient tribes and native cultures are innately interesting and Greene misses an unusual chance to explore these subjects. He has an unfortunate habit of calling shamans and other African spiritual leaders "devils." My complaint here is not that he is politically incorrect, as he is remarkably respectful and open to the people he meets. Yet he uses this term as a humorous means of dismissing their entire culture, without ever explaining how their society works, and why it might be either satisfying or unsatisfying. It's not so much that he doesn't like the culture of the natives he meets, as that he is uninterested in it.

The same is true of the folk customs that he encounters. He finds the drumming and singing of the Africans to be boring, and sees their ancient dances as a primitive form of the "Charleston." The Charleston was popular for ten years at most, while the rhythms, dancing and clothes of the tribes he encountered might well have had a 10,000 year history. He bypasses an entire culture designed to establish social customs that held tribes together, dealt with death and disease, and ensured some tentative form of economic structure. Greene says nothing of these issues; it's all just noise and mindless dance moves to him.

In other books, Greene writes with great feeling and skill about the Catholic Church, its beliefs and customs. Can't he summon some of that skill to examine the religion and culture of the Africans he encounters on this trip? My claim is not that all religions are equal, or that each cultural has the depth of the rich, 2000 year history of art, philosophy and politics associated with the Catholic Church. But surely there was some cultural in Liberia, something worth discussing in more depth than the cursory, off hand comments that Greene uses when dismissing the customs of the primitive peoples with whom he lived intimately for several weeks.

All this might have been easier to take had the book been easier to read. I've heard some people complain about Greene's prose style even as manifested in his best books. I disagree with those critics. At his best, Greene used the English language with great skill, and he had a remarkable ability to create characters and set a scene. This is a well written book, and some passages in it are brilliant. For instance, Greene portrays the human traits in the laborers he employed to help him during his journey. He describes vividly their character when they became funny, cheerful, sad, lazy or morose. The disease and pestilence that he encountered is often made excruciatingly real, so that one can see the sweat on people's faces, feel the sting of bugs, and hear the sound of rodents scrabbling through the grass huts at night when the lights are out. Yet some of his sentences ramble on through dense thickets of prose through five or six long lines of tiny print without ever revealing much of interest to anyone. In the opening pages of the text he quotes at length from miserable guidebooks that would otherwise have happily sunk without a trace into the mists of time had he not chosen to preserve them.

This is not a bad book, and some very insightful men, Paul Theroux among them, think it is a great book. This gives me pause. Certainly in reading it, I learned quite a bit about Liberia, and perhaps more than I wanted about the viewpoint Graham Greene adopted when he traveled in Africa. I have now, however, started a new book, a novel by George Orwell on his experiences in Burma set in the same time frame as this text. Orwell writes beautiful, with clear vivid prose. He brings to life the people, both English and native, who lived in Burma with a bright, energetic clarity. Though Graham Greene's book is not at all without merit, I'm grateful to be reading Orwell's "Burmese Days" and to be done with "Journey without Maps."

Fabulous book so interesting and imaginative. Grahame Greene is a master of
literature in every sense. Vibrant exciting prose fluid style that expands fiction.Have enjoyed his books again and again.Recommend this book.

I hate rats, and rats are my abiding memory of this travel book written by Greene about his travels in Liberia in 1935.

He and his cousin set out to travel across most of the country accompanied by native bearers at a time when there were few maps of the country at all, and none of the interior.

The group travelled from village to village and this is where the rats come into the story. At night when lying in his hammock and the lamps were doused the "rats teemed " down the walls eating everything in sight. What the rats didn't eat the cockroaches did. Greene managed to sleep most nights only due to a vast consumption of whiskey, his supply of which must have taken several natives to carry.

This is a real travel book, not written by some TV personality flown into a location for the day and then out at night to his hotel.

Nothing seems to have changed in Africa either, the europeans exploited the natives, the natives exploited the other natives who exploited anything that was left.

A great travel book with some autobiographical insight from Greene concerning his life in Britain as well.

Graham Greene is one of my all time favourite authors, which is saying something given I suspect he was a real masogynist. This possibility hasn't prevented me from appreciating his masterful ability to tell a tale. I also suspect that a lot of his other titles are autobiographical.