Customer Reviews

The Songlines

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Dying of AIDS and with Salman Rushdie, Bruce Chatwin made a lightning visit to Australia. The Songlines is the fascinating result of this terminal search for meaning.

The good points are that Chatwin's considerable intellect and narrative capacities weave a story based on year's travel experience. The bad point is that he knew almost nothing about his subject and as such has written an Englishman's compassionate contemporary account of the colonies.

I live and work on a remote aboriginal community near the areas Chatwin visited. Traditional Aborignal law is an amazingly complex oral culture so rich in history and symbolism that I have profound doubts about any whitefella ever properly understanding it, let alone a visiting foreigner desperately looking for something.

This is a great book, but don't think by reading it you will get a terrifically accurate profile of what being an aborigine is, whatever that means. They are not, as Chatwin seems to deduce, another group of nomadic noble savages more fulfilled than the more sedentary post-agriculture communitites.

This is a difficult book to describe: it masquerades as a Theroux style travelogue, but is anything but. I love Paul Theroux, but this totally transcends his travel writing. Chatwin starts out describing a trip to the Australian Outback. It starts out pretty conventional, in beautiful descriptive prose...but before too long you realize you are actually reading Chatwin's brilliant ruminations about the human race as a species, where we came from, and where we are going. The book is NOT really about the Aborigines, though they provide a number of terrific characters, and I suspect someone who really wanted to know more about the actual Songlines could be disappointed by this book. He very clearly sets up his own views against those of many important and popular thinkers. To sum it up, he makes a case that humans are not really an aggressive species at heart, and that evolution has not really programmed the human to fight for power but to defend the tribe. Not every will agree with this, but he makes a wonderful case and the book is beautiful and crystalline and should be read by everyone.

William James said that to "learn the secrets of any science, we go to expert specialists, even though they may be eccentric persons, and not to commonplace pupils." It seems, Bruce Chatwin used the same method to shed light on what for him was the question of questions: the nature of human restlessness.

The Songlines consists of the stories of the eccentric experts in the science of restlessness Chatwin met in Western Australia, and notebook entries ranging from Blaise Pascal's philosophical reflections to a meeting with Konrad Lorenz in Austria. Chatwin had originally intended to use these notebook entries for a book on nomads. He gave up the project but the entries reveal the man and his quest.

In a way, The Songlines is Chatwin's own songline: a track which tells of what he found on his wanderings, and what he considered worth singing.

This book starts out with a kind of nice, floating narrative about a meandering trip through Australia's outback. You get a candid look at Aborigines and their land rights movement in a way that's not at all preachy but rather funny. Unfortunately, just as I was starting to care about where the characters were going and what would happen to them, Chatwin treats us to page after page of "pensees," his own and others', on the subjects of nomadism and other topics in cultural and physical anthropology. I was an anthropology major, so I enjoyed many of his ideas, but found some of his main premises to be preposterous... For example, pastoral peoples are notoriously anything but pastoral, being extremely xenophobic and violent as a rule. Chatwin seems to be trying to convince us that the Aboriginals are peaceful and sweet because they roam around a lot... well, maybe. But I don't know that I needed fifteen pages of one-paragraph "thoughts" to state the point. Honestly, I couldn't help skipping pages to get back to the narrative. I understand where Chatwin was coming from with his "pensees" format, but Pascal he is not. Still, if you want a little food for thought, you might enjoy it. If you're looking for a narrative, forget it. Unlike the aborigines, whose travels have purpose and wonderful stories, Chatwin's narrative just kind of ambles around in the dust.

To really understand this book, of course, you have to understand that Chatwin knew he was dying of AIDS when he wrote it. Hence, (I think) the notes (which have raised so many pros and cons and head-scratchings among reviewers) tacked on at the end. He, sadly, was sinking fast and needed something to round out the book. The book, then, is not so much about the aborigines (which, as one reviewer has noted, it would be better to check out an Anthropolgy text on) as it is about the ailing Chatwin.-But who was Chatwin? I think he was primarily a) an erudite hyper-aesthete (He started out working for museums); and b) an unflagging disciple of Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher whose most famous dictum was "Everything is fire." In other words, everything is in constant change. Everything is on the move. Everything is being consumed and reborn. Whether it looks that way or not. As the poet Delmore Schwartz put it, "Time is the school in which we learn, that Time is the fire in which we burn."-This is why,I think the aborigines grabbed hold of his imagination at the end of his life, "Aboriginals,in general, had the idea that all "goods" were potentialy malign and would work against their possessors unless they were forever in motion." And, like Heraclitus, he inveighs against the members of his own race, "The whites were forever changing the world to fit their doubtful vision of the future."-But what was Chatwin's vision of the future? What did he expect to find out there in his dying days?-I think he gives the answer on page 293, the penultimate page of the book, where he writes, "...the mystics believe the ideal man shall walk himself to a 'right death.' He who has arrived 'goes back.' In Aboriginal Australia, there are specific rules for 'going back' or, rather, for singing your way to where you belong: to your 'conception site', to the place where your tjuringa is stored. Only then can you become-or re-become-the Ancestor. The concept is quite similar to Heraclitus's mysterious dictum,'Mortals and immortals, alive in their death, dead in each other's life."---I'm not at all sure exactly what this passage means. But the basic idea, I think, is that you keep moving down your songline or metaphysical groove or whatever until you die where you belong and thus rebegin a ghostly cycle of reincarnation. Chatwin's tone in quoting the Aboriginal beliefs and Heraclitus give us no clue as to how much of this he actually believed...But we do know from his life that he was always walking, always searching up to the very end.-Reading the book with this knowledge lends to it (despite the jumble it is that caused my four star review) an almost heroic quality.-So read it and be inspired!

Bruce, an English guy, heads into the Australian outback to check out aborigines, as part of his life-long interest in nomadic cultures. Part of the book is travel writing - the wacko Australian situations and characters he meets are fully described - part the history/psychology/philosophy of nomadic living and human aggression, and part a poetic description of Aboriginal culture.

The link between a human sedentary existance and human aggression has long been described; Bruce presents sedentary living as an unnatural state, and the nomadic lifestyle as cleaner, more beautiful and better. It's very convincing while you're reading it, and certainly deeply interesting. It's certainly a refreshing counterpoint to thinking about all those land-related wars and situations (Israel, for example), to all the nastiness of European colonization in America, Africa, and Australia, and it has a certain intuitive appeal - land belongs to everyone!

I'm not certain how accurate Bruce's description of Aboriginal culture is, but I don't think it really matters. This is not a carefully constructed sociological or anthropological analysis, but rather a lyrical, and fairly romantic, description of nomadic life and a way of thinking. Most importantly, I think, the message is: the ways the Aboriginies think and relate to the land are powerful and beautiful and so different to what we're used to that it's very difficult for Westerners to appreciate them immediately.

I strongly recommend this book, because it outlines a way of thinking about the human condition that is nice, and that lingers in your mind for a long time.

Nominally a book recounting the time Chatwin spent with the Australian Aboriginal tribes of Alice Springs, The Songlines in reality weaves together travel writing, history, and literary quotations to become a larger project about nomadism and evolution. It is as though what he found in Australia startled him into crystalizing a lifetime worth of disparate thoughts. More than classic travel writing or essay form, The Songlines captures the struggle to put this overarching thesis into words.

The struggle of the Aborigines to preserve their traditional form of worship against disinterest, hostility and monied patronization is one of the central contemporary aspects of the book. Additionally, Chatwin draws from sources as disparate as Konrad Lorenz, religious myth, and Herman Melville to construct his arguments.

I found Songlines largely successful. As someone who once walked from Holland to Spain I have a soft spot for discourse about the philosophy of walking. I also greatly admire Chatwin as a writer, so did not have any expectations that this would be a "normal" travel book. I strongly suspect that the method he uses (journal fragments and quotations interspersed throughout) may not work for many readers and it ultimately might have been stronger had he found a more integrated narrative form.

In short, this should be a very strong read if you are interested in the ideas at the center of the work. If you have read this far in the review it probably goes without saying that this is not the book for a typical travel essay about life in the Australian bush. Look elsewhere if that is what you are trying to find. I find it an excellent addition to the Chatwin body of work-- a body of work that is far too small as a result of his untimely death in 1989.

When I first migrated to Australia in 1983, I immediately started asking questions about the country's indigenous aborigines. For me, it was simple curiosity. New Zealand, where I'd come from, had imperfect race relations, but Maori dances, hakas, and creation stories were taught from primary level at every school. Like many "Pakeha" (white) New Zealanders, I had a part-Maori partner - whom I later married. In Perth, however, no-one I spoke to, including white journalists with whom I worked, could tell me what the "Dreamtime" spoken about in aboriginal culture meant. Their demeanour suggested the very questions displayed a lack of taste.

Strange then, that it should have been a Briton who gave me my first insights - to have the boldness both to outline and celebrate the unique richness of Aboriginal cosmology, and to put it in the context of the great nomadic traditions of human life. This is beautifully written, wry and teasing; it respects aboriginality, but shows a lightness of touch rare in this particularly fraught field.

Arguments have been made against this book on anthropological grounds, and on the grounds that no non-aboriginal person should presume to write about such matters. There may be merit in these points of view; I am simply grateful that Chatwin turned his brilliance to this subject. I find this book as illuminating and as life-affirming now, as when I first read it many years ago.

Other books I can recommend, although more prosaic in style, are Geoffrey Blainey's "The Triumph of the Nomads", Henry Reynolds' "Frontier" and "Why Weren't We Told" and the official reports into the so-called "Stolen Generation" and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

There is still a way to go.

'One man's impassioned song' is how the Sunday Telegraph describes this rare jewel of a book and a more apt description of it couldn't be found. It is truly one man's, one great artist's swansong to eternity and like all great works it has something to say to all of us.

Billed as a 'travel book,' Bruce Chatwin's 'Songlines' is that in name only. Following in the steps of other literateurs who were also originally pigeonholed as mere travel writers ie. Conrad, Greene, etc...Chatwin magically transforms a place, the Australian outback, and a people, the 'aboriginals,' into the characters of a majestic cosmic play. In truth, Songlines is really an accessible and persuasive treatise on the nature of man, hiding under the guise of a travel book.

Chatwin's thesis is simple: that human beings are migratory--'nomadic' is his catchy phrase--in their most natural (read here, best) state. To support this thesis, Chatwin follows the ancestral songlines of the Australian aboriginals who believe the world and all its creations were sung into existence by their semi-divine 'ancestors.' To reaffirm their identity, their place in this world and the 'world' itself, today's Aboriginals retrace the routes their ancestors walked across the continent, re-singing everything back into life. In mapping out this moving creation myth, Chatwin enlists the help of aboriginal 'expert,' Arkady, erudite son of Ukrainian exiles. With vibrant color, humor and sun-drenched clarity, Chatwin recounts their memorable encounters with the sometimes freakish, always original, denizens of the Australian outback.

To support his claim of man as migratory animal, Chatwin interrupts these gem-like anecdotes with a vast array of historical and anthropological aphorisms, facts and commentary. While their placement sometimes appears rather arbitrary, these tidbits spice up the whole and provide a pleasant balance to the stories that surround them.

Songlines is hard to put down as the effortless, pristine style carries the reader along on a voyage all its own. Nicholas Shakespeare wasn't far off the mark in crowning Chatwin as the 'greatest stylist writing in England today.' Even if you don't buy the idea the book is selling, the writing itself is enough to recommend it. Especially for writer wannabes. Every sentence is a cut and polished gem. Terse, tight and clean, all the fat has been cut off, leaving the choicest morsels. And what morsels! Not only does Chatwin say it exquisitely, he also has something to say. That's not just fine writing, that's art.

And if the writing isn't enough, the seeds of thought that Songlines plants are tough stuff and unlikely to blow away all that easily. Chatwin makes a strong case that when humans decided to 'settle' down---to civilize themselves---they actually caused more evil than good. Settling down meant holding onto things and marking out borders of possession. And because our natural restlessness became inihibited, we learned to covet more things and wider boundaries. Not only that, but by settling down we lost something profoundly important to our physical and spiritual makeup: our connection with the earth itself and with its other inhabitants, who, unlike us, seem content to take only what they need and then move on.

Songlines' greatest message is that life itself is a journey. Therefore, we should live it as one, constantly moving, constantly growing to the next level of existence, learning to let go of that which was never 'ours' to possess.

Those who are looking for such a journey into the human condition won't regret picking up Songlines!

Chatwin's Songlines investigates the essence of humanity's interactions and impulses in a accessible, storytelling prose. Chatwin has no difficulty in using the roots of the Aborigine culture as a stage to incorporate his far reaching notes and theories on the human species' instinctual needs. The concept that humans act with primordal instincts establishes the foundation for Chatwin's thesis that the interactions and social structures of nomadic or less civilized societies can indicate the needs people have for movement, defensive social agreements (companionship)for survival, and self recognition through knowledge of one's surroundings.
Chatwin builds upon his discriptions of the Aboriginal culture with memoirs from his other interactions with different cultures to develop a universal message about the human condition. He further punctuates his message with anecdotes and notes that can be a slight nuisance to read while attempting to finish the story, but add fascinating background information and perspective from many of Chatwin's most influential sources.
The Songlines is aproximately 300 pages, but is such a stimulating read it can be finished in only two or three sittings and easily within a week.