Customer Reviews

Ninety-Two Days: A Journey in Guiana and Brazil

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From the first page to the last Waugh sweats his way around Guiana, a country he confesses early on he never even meant to visit, exuding contempt from every pore.

It is unusual for a travel writer to show so much dislike for his chosen destination while still managing to carry his audience along with him. Partly this derives from Waugh's finely turned humour; partly the lack of foreknowledge most readers will have on such a rarely visited territory; and mainly from the succession of luminous characters that he bequeaths us to light the way along his lonely and fly-bitten road.

Guyana is a fascinating place and occupies an important niche in British travel literature. Walter Ralegh's travelogue "The Discoverie of Guiana" is now recognised as being the first major modern English prose work, predating Bacon's "Essays", and there have been a steady stream of excellent and varied accounts ever since.

Part of this fascination must stem from the long held assumption that Guiana was the kingdom of the legendary king "El Dorado"; certainly it was this that led Ralegh there in search of glory, and ultimately led him there again fatefully two decades later. Nevertheless the stamp of character of a country is a reflection of its people, and Guyana, as the former British colony is now called, has always borne such characters in abundance. As Waugh himself, Judge Henry Kirke ("25 Years In British Guiana"), Gerald Durrell ("Three Singles To Adventure"), Margaret Bacon ("Journey To Guyana") and, more recently, Pauline Melville ("The Ventriloquist's Tale") have discovered, they make for good reading.

If Waugh is flawed in his approach, it is only that his unremitting negativity makes the reader wonder why he ever went there at all. Indeed, I am sure that Waugh asked himself the same question almost every day: it is significant that he chose to entitle his book after the duration of his visit, almost as if he was counting off every hour like beads on a rosary. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Waugh professed to dislike his five travel books so intensely later in life that he asked they never be republished. And, with the exception of the compilation of excerpts "When The Going Was Good", they never were. Maybe he came to see his cynicism as a sin which for which subsequently he wished to atone in some manner. Thankfully his estate have been his confessors and allowed us, in their absolution, a singular glimpse into a rare country and a rare mind.

Strangely, Evelyn Waugh so disliked his own travel books that he would not allow them to be republished in his own lifetime. He seems to have considered them - even Labels a thinly disguised account of his own honeymoon - as little more than an excuse for his desperately felt need to escape the horrors of the English winters. Every year, when he could, he elected the escape of all-absorbing project to hide away from a potential attack of his own personal version of SAD (seasonal affective disorder). His own questioning of "What on earth am I doing here?" echoes throughout this Ninety-Two days of arduous exploring - and note that he counts them!
He might well ask, as the overheard adventurous accounts that determined his trip and intrigued him into his planning were stories of New Guinea (Papua), not he had mistakenly convinced himself, of British Guiana (Guyana)! But it was to Guyana he went, with a little nip of an attempted side-trip to the fabled Amazonian city of Manaos, trapping him briefly in Brazil.
In his introduction that is almost a justification for his trip, he asks; "Who in his senses will read, let alone buy, a travel book ... about a place he has no intention of visiting?" Luckily for Evelyn the answer is obvious, otherwise he would have difficulty in funding all his trips, but as he never originally had any intention himself of visiting Guyana, it is a cheeky question!
Evelyn's sneaky wit sometimes peeps out of the truly grueling hazards of this trip, but one does struggle with him through the hard trekking, primitive and unreliable communications and grotesque food. Evelyn's writing however is our reward for our participation in his journey.
In further justifications of his book, Evelyn muses on the trend he discerns in his peers as they seek to convince their own readers that they are merely "workers' toiling at an arduous and disliked craft. "Englishmen dislike work and grumble about their jobs and nowadays writers make it so clear that they hate writing that their public may become excusably sympathetic and urge them to try something else." Many of us who read everything written by the talented Waugh family are grateful that Evelyn loved writing, even if he did dislike his own wonderful travelogues!