Was fascinated to learn of Greene's travels in Liberia.

A deeply disturbing book to read, mainly because of how blithely racist it (and Graham Greene) are, but I read it to gain insight into one of Greene's more flawed novels that I love: A Burnt-Out Case. Journey Without Maps was published in 1936, a year after Greene trekked across Liberia, drinking whiskey the whole way, being carried part-way in a hammock by his black porters, and writing about the sexual desirability of Liberian girls, the crazy (to him) village shamans, the yellow fever/malaria/rats/cockroaches/jiggers (chiggers)that all threatened to kill him. A Burnt-Out Case, set in a leprosy settlement along the Congo River, wasn't published until 1960, but it contains significant traces of Journey Without Maps.

A wonderful travel memoir, a good insight into Liberian history from a colonial perspective and interestingly much of the narrative still rings true.

I am stuck reading the electronic selections from the library and this was the only Graham Greene available. He was obviously very intelligent, well read, and well spoken. The beginning prose is very attractive. As the book progresses I felt the editor lost interest and did not review the copy. He seems to have had money and time and traveled 300 miles in uncharted by white people areas in and around Liberia with only a vague purpose and no clear resolution. I think he just needed to pump out another book to keep his income up.

Greene's travels in West Africa in the 30s. Probably left to his being stationed there during WW II, and resulted in the "Heart of the Matter". Young Grahame was an excellent travel writer and he makes West Africa seem like an unpleasant but fascinating place. Good to read on a cold winters day.

Although I have had a copy of this book for year, I had always avoided it – not a novel, not even an entertainment. Imagine my surprise, then, to find that it is an excellent “read,” full of the promise of the Greene to come.
tHe still hearkens back to his psychoanalysis days and exhibits his binary options of most events (“I find myself torn between two beliefs: the belief that life should be better than it is and the belief that when it appears better it is really worse”). But, he is also maturing, as he says on leaving Liverpool for Liberia: “while England slipped away from the porthole, a stone stage, a tarred side, a slap of grey water against the glass.”
tThe Uniform Edition, reset and published by Heinemann in 1950, includes 16 full-page excellent photographs of many of the sites visited, including “The Devil at the Funeral.” The Pan paperback edition deletes a few of these photos and inserts a few new ones.

GREENE’S OWN COMMENTS ON JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

tWhen a second edition of the book was done by Heinemann, Greene added a new two-page preface, dated “London, November 1946.” He says he returned there “to work” (in Sierra Leone) and he semi-apologizes for “the hard words I used about Freetown, for Freetown is now one of the homes I have lived and worked in through all the seasons.”
tIn The Collected Edition of this book ((London: Heinemann & Bodley Head, 1978), the 1946 “Preface” of the second edition is included as well as a new 13-page introduction by Greene. Speaking of the strange interludes in the Book when Greene recalls his youth in England, he says: “forty years ago I could play happily enough even with the darkest and furthest memories of childhood – they were not so dark or so distant as they seem to me today.” He spend a good deal of time justifying the personal biography in the book.
tHe gives some indication of the purpose of the trip: “It was a period when ‘young authors’ were inclined to make uncomfortable joruneys in search of bizarre material, Peter Fleming to Brazil and Manchuria, Evelyn Waugh to British Guiana an Ethiopia. We were a generation brought up on adventure stories who had missed the enormous disillusionment of the First War; so we went look for adventure…”
tHe discusses in some detail the rash decision to include his cousin, Barbara, in the trip with this interesting conclusion: “Only in one thing did she disappoint me – she wrote a book. However, her generosity was apparent even there, for she waited several years, until after my own book had appeared (and disappeared, for it was suppressed almost immediately by the threat of a libel action from a man of whose very existence I had been unaware), before she published her Land Benighted.” At the end of this new introduction, he spend several pages quoting from his cousin’s book – a fascinating description from her vantage of Greene’s illness (and near death) at the end of the journey. He concludes his comments by updating his memories of a couple of characters in the book with more recent knowledge.

I'm glad to have read this and have learnt a lot--about Africa, Graham Greene, and "civilisation." My blog: https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/...

Old-fashioned and imperialistic - but what a great writer Greene is! Nothing much happens in the entire book, characters are intermittently mentioned (why is his cousin there? why did they quarrel?) and some episodes are only fragmentarily sketched. Mostly it's about a long slog (with what purpose?) through Sierra Leone and Liberia. Written before WWII, the author's views belie some old-school British imperialism, especially notable when he writes about magnanimously opting out of being carried through the jungle in a hammock by the African carriers he hired back in Sierra Leone, or when he lets them go in Monrovia to fend for themselves and get back home.
But the man can write. In spite of all the above, and the moral irritations one know feels with said attitudes, I've read every page with pleasure. It's like listening to your favourite uncle tell a good story.

I really, really like the fictional world of Graham Greene's novels but just as I'd never make a true life explorer, on this evidence GG made a lousy chronicler of his real overland travels. I lost the will to live somewhere during his report about a church service in Sierra Leone and didn't make it much further never mind as far as Liberia. Seriously random and seriously dull.

This book is not a novel. Indeed, it is not really travel writing, although written about a trip into Africa in the 1930's. Unfortunately, it is like a series of rather dull diary entries without coherence or direction. Skip this book, and read Greene's extraordinary A Burnt-Out Case.

My favorite Uncle Graham went travelling.

It was his first trip outside Europe at the age of 30 - and this trip would shape his future career in many ways.

I like Graham Greene and I like Africa, so when I´m administering only 3 stars it is mainly because this diary-like novel doesn´t really feel coherent.
Surely I admire a man who throw himself into the abyss well knowing it may go wrong, but even Graham Greene mentions Mungo Park as an inspiration, Mungo Park did a much better job at telling his story.

Apart from this slightly critic view at the handcraft, there are interesting observations about Liberia a few years before WW2.
The political climate in West Africa has regrettably only changed a little.
Also, as GG allegedly returned to Sierra Leone during WW2 in spite of the hardships he encountered in neighboring Liberia is an interesting twist - not to mention his later travels to the Congo Basin.

This edition has foreword and introduction by two hardcore travelers, Paul Theroux and Tim Butcher and even these two texts combined are almost as long as GG´s travel tale it is well worth reading.

I put off reading this book until I was able to read his cousin Barbara's alternative account of the same journey. I am glad I did because Barbara's book "Too late to turn back" (first published as "Land Benighted") is much more readable. Graham includes long sections of introspection which seem irrelevant to the story. For much of the book he seems unaware of the presence of his cousin (who rather rashly agreed to accompany him).
Graham does provide an account of Liberian politics in the 1930's, both the Americo-Liberian government with its electorate of less than 15,000 (in 1928 President King won the election with a majority of 600,000). He also describes the politics of the villages with their chiefs and occasionally a District Commissioner or tax-collector. President King had recently been forced to resign by the League of Nations as it had been proved that he had been selling indigenous Liberians into slavery in Fernando Po (an island of Spanish Equatorial Guinea). His replacement President Barclay (the former Vice President) was trying to make an impression up country and the Greenes meet him in Kolahun but he is as corrupt as his predecessor.
The author had gone to Liberia on behalf of the Anti-Slavery Society to find out if Firestone was using slavery in its rubber plantation. He did make a report to the Anti-Slavery Society on his return to London (according to Tim Butcher in "Chasing the Devil") but there is no indication in this book that Firestone used forced labour.
The book provides inspiration for "Scoop" by Evelyn Waugh which describes Italian interference in an independent African country which looks more like Liberia than Ethiopia.