read as part of 2018 Irish Meridians Challenge

follows the author's inter-war period expedition, a four week trek to Liberia

really is an Empire's eye view
natives are to be pitied, condescended to and exploited in the main

not much effort to see the reality of life for the local populations

large entourage to support his journey, portrayed as simplistic, superstitious
interminible complaining at jungle treks, fortunately his whisky supply just about lasts the journey

not what I was hoping for, not alot of insight into a nation of freed slaves

In two African countries the colonists were mainly freed slaves, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Graham Greene visited both countries, travelling from Freetown to Grand Bassa.
The book starts with his journey to Africa on a cargo ship, calling at a few places on the way, but not for long enough to get much insight into them. There is more about his thoughts, musings and expectations than the places he sees, which was well written, but not what I really wanted from a travel book. Once he is in Sierra Leone and then starts his journey overland, the book settles down and becomes more of a travelogue.
Three-quarters of the book covers Liberia and his view of Sierra Leone is superficial in comparison, but he comes out with the opinion that Freetown's Europeanised residents would have been better off remaining in slavery. I can only imagine he was being deliberately controversial and provocative, but it was enough to make me distrust his other observations. In contrast, he considers the Protectorate areas, where British are administering indigenous Africans, to be well managed and the Africans themselves to be better.
Even at the time Greene visited Liberia, there was conflict between the indigenous population and the freed-slave settlers who ran the country. There are also adventurers after the mineral wealth which later fueled the conflict and turned into civil war. Greene is unusually optimistic about the country to a large extent however, although he does bemoan the impossibility of making any plan and following it and suggests the country was chaotically run. His descriptions of the villages and towns he stays in and the people he meets in them are detailed and scenic, so it makes for an entertaining and enjoyable read, even if not a deep insight into the country.

Another of the "100 greatest adventure books" that I found it impossible to get through -- I abandoned Greene's book when I was three-quarters of the way through after realizing it wouldn't get much better.

I found Greene's general attitude toward those he met on his walk across Liberia and his treatment of his porters to be really irritating. Nothing much of interest happens on his walk across the country either. A grating narrator and a tepid account of what should have been a grand adventure helps make this book extremely dull.

“The motive of a journey deserves a little attention. It is not the fully conscious mind which chooses West Africa. There are times when one is willing to suffer discomfort for the chance of finding the 'heart of darkness' based on not only one's present but of the past from which one has emerged. To me Africa has always seemed an important image. It’s not any part of Africa which has acted so strongly on the unconscious mind; certainly no part where the white settler has been most successful in reproducing the conditions of his home country. A quality of darkness is needed, of the inexplicable. Today our world seems peculiarly susceptible to brutality when one sees to what peril of extinction that the centuries of cerebration have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover from where we have come, to recall at which point we went astray.”

“The men had been educated to understand how they had been swindled, how they had been given the worst of two worlds, and they had enough power to express themselves in a soured officious way; they had died, inside their European clothes. They wore uniforms, occupied official positions, had the vote, but they knew all the time they were funny (oh, those peals of laughter!), funny to the heartless prefect eye of the white man. If they had been slaves they would have had more dignity, since there is no shame in being ruled by a stranger. They were expected to play the part like white men and the more they copied white men, the more funny it was to the prefects. They were withered by laughter; the more desperately they tried to regain their dignity the funnier they became.”

“I never wearied of the villages in which I spent the night: the sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits. Love was an arm round the neck, wealth a little pile of palm nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature. And these were the people I had been told couldn't trusted. It was no good protesting later that one had not come across a single example of dishonesty from the natives in the interior: only gentleness, kindness, an honesty which one dared not to assume in Europe.”

- Graham Greene, 1936

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During one of his manic episodes Graham Greene decided to leave merry old England for a sojourn in Africa; not just any part of Africa but the wildest unmapped region now known as Liberia, where the explorers had penetrated only a few miles inland. Kenya or South Africa wouldn’t do, he had to reach his own personal heart of darkness. Equipped with provisions requiring thirty native carriers to transport: beds, chairs, tables, tents and cases of the most critical ingredient whiskey, with his cousin Barbara in tow, he left Liverpool and sailed south to Tenerife, a resort island off the coast of Spain, to Dakar in Senegal, happy port where locals lounged in the sun, landing in Freeport, Sierra Leone, a British colony of English manners.

Crossing the border without the proper papers, Greene and entourage began a 350 mile month long trek through the backcountry bush. On the way he encountered indigenous peoples, devil dancers, selfless missionaries, yellow fever, malaria, dysentery and venereal disease, staying in huts rife with rats, cockroaches the size of crayfish and run of the mill mosquitoes. Along narrow trails through the forest and furnace a depressive phase set in, where folly turns to regret and recrimination, and as the whiskey ran out was replaced with ennui and desperation. Literally on last legs he begins to see shacks of wood and tin, markets and men in clothes, women with shirts and skirts, cold beer and iced gin, in short civilization.

Greene was 30 years old in 1935 when he traveled to Africa with a cousin who isn’t written much about and published her own account. He is critical of the colonial commissioners and favorable towards the natives and missionaries. It was the first time he traveled outside of Europe, and to one of the most difficult regions of Africa. He would later describe it as “foolhardy…absurd and reckless”. The journey is at times interrupted by flashback scenes from England and Europe that seem to have little connection to the story. Beyond these distractions there is an undeniable sense of self discovery. It’s curious how V S Naipaul patterned himself after Greene, as a traveling critic of empire and a novelist of the world, without giving due credit.

************

“I never thought much of Greene. His novels have rather faded, haven’t they? I am not an admirer.” - V S Naipaul

I’m a sucker for colonial adventure stories, especially in Africa, so this was an easy one to pick up. I struggled through the slog of middle of it but was rewarded at the end when it really began to feel like I had suffered through the same brutal journey that Graham did. It really was a very well told story of a young man trying to find himself in a country trying to find itself.

I don’t know if it’s me or the book itself, or the fact that I grabbed this one right after reading Kapuscinski’s extraordinary “The shadow of the sun”, but I found Greene’s account banal, ignorant and at times racist. Very chaotic narrative combined with the old English made it also quite difficult to read and as such, decided to drop the book at some point after half-way through.

Journey Without Maps
I’ve been reading some of the comments on Amazon and Goodreads on Graham Greene’s book before writing this. I’ve read most of Greene’s work, some many times, but not this until just now, and I was interested in what others thought of it. I don’t seem to see it the same way. You can investigate those other opinions for yourself, but here’s a little of my take.
It goes back to Norman Sherry’s fabled three volume biography. In the introduction to Volume Two he writes: ‘In life he was not willing to allow full entrance even to those familiar with his secret life. ‘ (Two ‘life’s’ there: tut tut Sherry) He goes on to state at greater length what is generally accepted as true about Greene’s character: that he put lots of time and energy into concealing himself from all those around him, that he kept secrets privately and professionally, that for example he kept two diaries, that you could hardly ever believe his stated motivation for anything. Sherry follows this description of Greene’s deceptive nature by trotting out that old canard again about him playing Russian roulette six times in five months. His source for this? Greene told him.
There is a great element of this in Journey Without Maps. I suppose that is my main thought about it: that it is a demonstration of both Greene’s wonderful ability with language, and of the untrustworthy nature of his texts. For one thing it was not without maps, and not the map he described as having written across the territory in which he proposed to walk the word ‘Cannibals’.
I don’t know if it’s possible to learn why Greene went outside Europe for the first time and set himself this dirty, dangerous task of walking across Liberia for hundreds of miles, taking his debutante cousin with him, but I do know the narrative consists of some facts mixed with one dodgy bit of information after another. Even the cousin’s age is stated wrongly in newspaper reports of the time, this information presumably given by themselves: she was twenty-eight and not twenty-three.
There is a school of thought on this that Journey Without Maps is a glimpse into a world long gone, and a glimpse into a way of approaching this world, that of the middle-class son of the British Empire venturing abroad in those quieter years before the outbreak of WWII. And of course the other take on it: that it is a journey into the psyche of the participants, or of Greene anyway, for again an untruth, he writes as if he was alone and not accompanied by a cousin who is handling the stresses better than he is.
If it amounts to anything I think it is wonderful writing. We are in some wet, hot , muddy, insect-laden jungle one moment, and back in the Cotswold village were he has left his (unmentioned) wife and months-old child the next, and he makes it all flow and work and resonate and enthral us. Or me anyway. Jesus, could anyone ever write as well?
But I never believe a word he says. What he is telling you might be true. The opposite might be true. Anything might be true. Or not. It’s Graham Greene. To treat this as it is presented, as some travelogue of a walk in Liberia in the mid-thirties, taken on a whim, is to be a Norman Sherry: it’s to know the man telling you all this is a liar (the most wonderfully skilled writing liar conceivable, but a liar) and then swallow what he tells you anyway.
Read it for the skill of the writing. But let’s not be a Norman.

What I like best about Graham Green is his travel books and this one doesn't disappoint. His rebellious spirit brought him to Sierra Leone back in the mid 1930's. The epitome of the English traveller hiking through deep jungles recalls the century before but with more angst, as well as his English wit which keeps the novel going.

dated, but perhaps of interest for that rwason

Definitely entertaining writing I just don't understand what he's trying to do. Shows up in west Africa, wanders around with a bunch of freaks getting from this place to that...who gives a shit? Not the best memoir I've ever read by a long shot.

A Brit traveling around Africa with a dozen native porters carrying everything from his knickers to his whiskey and barely ever naming his traveling-companion cousin could have made for quite a comic travel account. But Greene never plays it for comic effect, and is even defensive that it might be construed as funny. The abilities that made Greene a notable author are on display but to little effect. The narrative is framed as retreat into the author's subconscious. "Primitive" Africa is like retreating to your childhood days as a form of psychotherapy. Get it?

If we are to excuse the biases borne by authors writing eighty years ago, you too can excuse my modern biases in giving the book a negative review.

I bought this book on a whim recently, in a fit of nostalgia for the time I spent living in Liberia some years ago. I enjoy Greene’s fiction, and I was curious to read this account of his unlikely journey on foot through the jungles of West Africa.

The narrative is fairly engaging, and it was interesting to read his impression of Monrovia at an earlier point in its history then when I lived there. Unfortunately, however, I find Greene’s narrative voice here utterly unbearable. Even allowing for the historical context, his constant and sneering racism is difficult to bear, and his crude sexualisation of women is no less offensive. He complains frequently, and comes across as a petulant and inept traveller. I have no idea how his female cousin (whose existence is barely mentioned in the narrative) put up with him as a travelling companion; I think I would have abandoned him in the jungle.

Thus, while it has some merits and a degree of personal interest for me, this book does not make for an enjoyable reading experience, and I doubt I’ll recommend it to any of my friends.