Journey Without Maps

In 1935 Graham Green traveled by foot from the West African Coast of Sierra Leone, through French Guinea, and into the depths of the Liberian Forest, a region unmapped at the time and labeled with the foreboding word, Cannibals, as the only descriptor as to what he would discover in his travels through the region. Greene’s travels were hardly pure back-country roughing since he was able to hire men to carry his mosquito net, cooking supplies, and a case of whiskey that he drank religiously throughout the 4 week, 350 mile trek. However, despite the bourgeois background to Green’s travels, his purpose was purely exploratory for the sake of learning and other than a brief period near the end when he was suffering with fever, he trekked the entire distance on foot.

Greene traveled into independent Liberia at a time when Europe had already divided up Africa for her own profit and he chose Liberia to explore because it was a nation founded by freed US slaves that presented a unique glimpse of an independent Africa. In his travels he faces a lot of hardship with bats, rats, and cockroaches ever present in the villages the stayed in and chiggers digging their way beneath his finger and toenails. Not all was hardship as Greene discovered many a unique native peoples, each with their own distinct dress, dance, and hospitality. He did not come across any cannibals, but he did encounter devils, spiritual shamans wearing masks that exert great power over the native people. The use of the word devil is only a fault in the English translation of his guides and Greene explains that these devils could very easily be described as angels for their purpose was not a distinction of good or evil, but as guides into the spiritual world.

“In a Christian land we have grown so accustomed to the idea of a Spiritual war, of God and Satan, that this supernatural world, which is neither good nor evil, but is simply Power, is beyond all comprehension.” (176)

It is in these passages depicting the practices of the Liberian people that Greene explores the purpose of his travel through this country. Despite his longing for the comforts of his Western culture, Greene discovers a raw bond of humanity that cannot be found in the Western world. It is in these discoveries that Greene is encouraged with an intense longing to live and make the best of his life – and in reading Journey Without Maps that longing is made clear through Greene’s introspective perspective that makes this a worthwhile read.

Interesting proof of old, long gone times with its habits and culture. However, definitely not the best travel book I’ve read.

Greene’s self-created therapy is far too arduous to have been widely emulated; still I like his title as instruction rather than merely as an account of an insane journey conceived after imbibing too much champagne at a party. Lessons for us all there!

Pese a la puntuación que le he dado al libro no puedo negar que Graham Greene es uno de mis escritores preferidos por algo: su enorme capacidad narrativa, literaria y descriptiva para transmitir emociones e imágenes llenas de intensidad y profundidad emotiva. Sin embargo, y de ahí la puntuación dada, soy más admirador del Graham Greene novelista, fabulador, que el narrador de viajes o de su propia vida. Y no porque en este libro en el que narra su primera vez en África y su caminata, sí caminata, de más de 500 km por Liberia, no se encuentre ese estilo tan inconfundible de Greene a la hora de contar una historia, aunque nada tenga de ficción, sino porque sinceramente no me ha transmitido aquello que esperaba y, esto, a veces duele más de lo que pensamos.

También es cierto que el África en estas páginas descrito ya no existe y hace mucho que dejó de ser para convertirse en una especie de mito, de leyenda o ser fabuloso que solo queda en la memoria de unos pocos. Un África extinta a la fuerza donde las supersticiones, el culto a la naturaleza, a los demonios y diablos insondables eran el día a día de tribus y clanes; donde la corrupción de señores políticos que se las daban de mesías salvadores al estilo occidental cimentaron el caos miserable que es hoy el Continente Africano.

"The responsibility of the journey had been mine… and now my mind had almost ceased to function. I simply couldn’t believe that we should ever reach Grand Bassa, that I had ever led a life different from this life"
(page 215)

That’s how Graham Greene felt about the interior of Liberia and that’s how I felt about his book. Green doesn’t so much describe the weariness of his adventure as impose it upon the reader. Reading this book feels much like being enveloped by post-lunch lethargy in a government ministry in Freetown, except it lasts longer. Greene focuses largely upon himself, be he walking drinking or being surrounded by cockroaches and rats. He writes about the interiors of Sierra Leone and Liberia constantly, while failing to convey much of interest. Any pressure I felt to like this book because it is by a big name author was quickly overwhelmed by my boredom.

Greene does, however, make some insightful observations that I think might be described as ahead of his time. These seem as relevant today as they were in the 1930s:

"Everything ugly in Freetown was European"
(page 37)

"There is something very attractive in this great patch of “freedom to travel”; absconding financiers might do worse than take to the African bush"
(page 61)

"There was a cruelty in the interior, but had we done wisely exchanging the supernatural cruelty for our own?"
(page 228)

But Greene should have had the decency to take my approach and put these observations into bullet points. As it is there are too sparsely scattered to outweigh the rest of this uninterestingly written diary.

Thank goodness it’s over.

3.45/10

There were some interesting moments and I reckon I'd like reading Green when he's in the zone. However, I don't think he enjoyed his little jaunt through the wilderness of Liberia and it showed I'm his writing.

He barely mentions his cousin Barbara who accompanied him. He's always drunk in the evenings and I can only assume hungover in the daytime. He cheaps out at every opportunity with his carriers and seemingly forms no meaningful relationship with any of the people he meets.

In 1935, Graham Greene took a literary risk that most writers, less than half a dozen novels old and still far from their breakthrough, would not even dream of taking. He embarked on his first ever tour outside the frontiers of Europe and that too to a far-flung country by the name of Liberia which most travel writers back then in the days before Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux would not even dream of exploring, let alone deconstructing it with the incisive depth of a journalist and portraying it with the searing honesty and even stark poetry of a great storyteller. The result was "Journey Without Maps" which, true to what we already know of Greene's ability to subvert, is less of a typical travelogue or even a travel diary, despite what some reviews here seem to suggest. Rather, it is a typically compelling narrative of a white man with both a roving eye and an astute perspective journeying across the breadth of a nation with a strange parentage and ancestry in his quest to discover, to probe into the mythical allure of this continent named Africa.

What compelled him to go ahead with this seemingly foolhardy quest in the first place? There were, as you must have guessed from the title, no reliable maps to know the exact directions of how to reach a place from another; there was preciously little written and chronicled about the country, its political scenario and even what it held for a travelling Englishman as Greene or even his cousin Barbara who accompanied him in this strange, seemingly aimless journey. And on top of that, hostility could be expected too; no white man had ever been in the depths of this country as it had been founded originally as a bastion of defiant freedom from the slave trade of America. What was Greene doing there? What did he aim to find, discover or unearth?

In his own words, he sought the source or the genesis of a new recourse to a primitive form of instinctive behaviour that he had been observing around him in the West and more precisely in a fast-changing England of the twentieth century. Africa had been chronicled and described in both its exotic glory and its imperialist grime even before, by the likes of Haggard and Conrad, two storytellers whose conflicting styles had inspired Greene's writing itself and it is to deconstruct both these facets that also serves, in a sense, Greene's real purpose, something subversive and radical for a mere chronicler that itself distinguishes this work as not merely unique but also essential reading for all.

But if that makes you think that "Journey Without Maps" is a weighty tome of a book, rest assured that this is far from a didactic or even exhausting book. Even as early as 1935, a time when Greene was still a book or two from cementing his fame as a storyteller who could blend moral complexity and philosophical seriousness with compelling storytelling, this is another testament to his always assured gift of writing and portraying experience, thought, action and after-thought with an elegant, crisp yet vivid and even poetic prose style that feels not only effortless but also enjoyable and enlightening to read. There are also some reviews here on Goodreads that have described this book as a "slog" - if readers are expecting that this is a travel book in the present-day sense, meant to evoke pleasing sights and sounds and smells in the fashion of a documentary, let me remind you that Greene is not interested in the aesthetic whitewashing of unvarnished, even unsavoury realities. We are always aware of the alienating barrenness of this uncharted country; we are always aware of the arduous difficulties of the trek with the faithful but even gently quarrelsome carriers, the meagre and even mediocre nature of the hospitality to be found in the numerous small villages to be found in between, the open hostility of the nature of this landscape - from the commonplace rats and cockroaches to the inexorable jiggers and other pests and creatures and even the general air of desolate despair and pathos in this bleak country. And yet, what is wondrous is how Greene records each and every unsavoury experience with gritty honesty, witty self-deprecation and even a loose sense of delirious joy and relief of being deprived of all material comforts and losing himself to the languid atmosphere of not only Liberia but also the core of Africa that it represents.

And that also does not mean that this is a book bereft of wonder. There is the warm, affectionate camaraderie with the native carriers, whom Greene describes as hard-working, dedicated men all too believable rather than just as cultural stereotypes; there is the first heady taste of the approach of the African continent, the first sight of the physical sexuality of the women and of the raw, feral charisma of the men, all described with an almost erotic, mesmerising intensity that the writer had brought and would bring again in his other writings and novels as well. Greene creates vivid, even haunting and indelible scenes for us to remember and scenes that resonate in the reader's mind long after finishing the book - the snail-like marks of sweat on the twitching bodies of the hammock carriers, the delirious exhilaration of the tribal dances, the strange, spell-binding hypnotism of the masked dancers, the terror and the mystery of the bush societies and the devils strutting across the breadth of the country, the relentless rats scampering down walls, the fear of a devil holding an entire village in the spell of paranoia and suspense, the carriers breaking into song on their march, the chiefs dashing eggs and swilling whiskey and even a sacred waterfall being the site of a mythical sacrifice.

And in between, in an ingenious, radical stroke, he also takes bold, beautifully written detours - the seediness of the suburbia of London, the grit and grime of Nottingham, the alienness of Eastern Europe, the atmosphere of violence and anarchy in Paris. And through all these, he reminds us of what he is driving here at - not merely a travel diary of a trek through a country, the first of the many turbulent, far-flung places that would attract his interest and attention, but most crucially a politically astute and psychologically resonant portrait of a culture of civilisation trying to reconcile itself with its primitive, base roots. Indeed, this is an unforgettable journey without the usual maps, a journey unprecedented in its intensity and its haunting portrait of the heart of darkness to be found, not in a continent, but in the heart of humanity itself.

Greene traveled to Sierra Leone and Liberia in 1936, starting in Freetown, making his way, by train, to the far eastern part of the country, from which, overland, he made his way to the Liberian coast, by passing through Guinea.

Greene is overly dramatic a, self confessed, amateur traveler and, really, a pussy, but the book is still interesting, because it paints a picture of the countries traveled from a perspective and a time now lost.
Now, the train back east doesn't run anymore, having been dismantled by president Siaka Stevens (what a name, eh?) in the 70s. The local train, from town up into the hills, had already stopped running in Greene's time.
The book shows how, already 70 years ago, Freetown, and, by extension, with that, urban Africa, sadly, was degrading slowly. Later, when Greene arrived in Monrovia, this image of Africa is reinforced.

Greene's experiences up country need to be taken with several grains of salt. On a few occasions, he mentions the potential existence of cannibals, which might have never existed and certainly didn't when Green was moving around, and his statements that, in several places, Greene and his traveling companion are the only whites visiting in living memory are as unlikely as laughable.

After his four week, only, stint, his first visit to Africa, Greene moved to Freetown and staid there for a year, in 1941, on which he wrote another book, The Heart of the Matter.

The bits I enjoyed best were Greene's occasional introspections into his own recent experiences in Europe, shortly after the depression, during the rise of Nazi Germany.