A unique adventure tale - reads like a journal; a very good one.

I decided to read this book for two reasons - one, Anthony Bourdain mentioned it as inspiring when he did a cooking tour through Liberia, and two, I wanted to read Graham Greene. Sigh. This was not the Greene book to start with. Much as the writing itself was beautiful, he suffered from terrible boredom on the trip and that translated directly to the reader experience…..

Graham greens always excels at what he does. This is a firsthand account of his travels in Africa. it is very insightful re culture and customs in far flung places.

I love travel books and this is no exception, as I’d heard so much about Graham Greene that I needed to finally pick up one of his books. The foreword is by no less than Paul Theroux, top-tier travel writer, so it showed great promise. But the beginning was a challenge and I nearly abandoned the effort. Fortunately, once they reached the deep jungle and had to rely on their wits and those of their carriers, the narrative really became enthralling. So glad to be in a cool, bug-free room, I was hooked on this tale. Recommended!

Although by Graham Greene, this is a travel book regarding his travel in Africa, specifically the great forest of Liberia. It, to be perhaps, too frank, lacks his usual imagination and excellence in writing. In addition, this subject matter did not withstand the test of time. Unlike many books of travel and history, this one was not remarkable. The trip itself was a great, remarkable adventure, the book, not so much.

I admit if I had read this in the Penguin reprint introduced by Paul Theroux (one of my favorite travel writers), that might've alerted to me to the book's highlights. But my library had for Kindle download only a standard copy, no frills. I have been reminded of Barbara Greene's Too Late to Turn Back Now, where she takes a role that in her brother's account finds her relegated, well, to offstage.

This followed his 1938 journey into Mexico during the anticlerical crackdown that inspired The Power and The Glory, as this Liberian trek in turn would A Burnt Out Case or The Heart of the Matter when Greene was posted in Freetown. While he dips into "French Guinea" and the Ivory Coast aka "France," it is mostly a blur. Seven hour hikes through jungle, rats, dreams (he does these well as in his Chiapas and Tabasco stint, and they're much more erudite and engaging than the ones I bother to remember), carriers, the missionaries (whom he rightly defends for their guts, rather than falling into stereotypes of rapacity or unhinged fervor; he delves into the eccentrics of his native Gloucestershire for oddballs as fearsome as any noble savage caricature), and his lassitude.

However, as with his Latin American excursion, the same dullness permeates much of the telling. I expected to be wowed by both but was left weary. As was he, certainly. He's best on comparing and contrasting the cultures of his English upbringing with the strangeness and the familiarities of his foreign encounters. But as to particular people he meets and profiles, among the expats, officials, and everyday folks, there's not a lot of memorable moments. As I know more about the Catholic Mexican rather than the Protestant African milieu, perhaps that lack in this Liberian-adjacent trek dulled my reception. Still, as a savvy observer of his own follies, even so-so Greene's worth a look.

This was an interesting read but it does feel a bit dated now. It has a real British empire, God save the King side to it, there is a definite line between the "White man" and the "Natives", you can see Graham Greene is trying to cross that line and be more sensitive, but it doesn't stop him from treating his team very slightly better than slaves and then he just abandons them at the end to find their own way home.

Whilst reading this I was wondering if Graham lost a bet and was forced to go on this journey because right from the start he is focused on the ending..... and tits. There is no enjoying the walk, looking for wildlife, anybody he meets he doesn't trust (unless they are white) and he barely puts any effort in to enjoying the experience. The writing changes near the end of his trip when he gets a fever, he suddenly develops a bond with the country and life in general. Seeing the change in him was interesting, but once he sees the coast his focus changes back to home again.

But in his defence he does walk across Africa for 4 weeks, with a case of whiskey and he downs the lot. So maybe it wasn't about the walk he just wanted to spend 4 weeks drunk. What a guy!

1) ''We, like Wordsworth, are living after a war and a revolution, and these half-castes fighting with bombs between the cliffs of skyscrapers seem more likely than we to be aware of Proteus rising from the sea. It is not, of course, that one wishes to stay forever at that level, but when one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray.''

2) ''The method of psychoanalysis is to bring the patient back to the idea which he is repressing: a long journey backwards without maps, catching a clue here and a clue there, as I caught the names of villages from this man and that, until one has to face the general idea, the pain or the memory. This is what you have feared, Africa can be imagined as saying, you can't avoid it, there it is creeping round the wall, flying in at the door, rustling the grass, you can't turn your back, you can't forget it, so you may as well take a long look.''

3) ''I thought of Vande in the dark urging the carriers over the long gaping swaying bridge at Duogobmai; I remembered they had never had the goat to guard them from the elephants. It wouldn't have been any use now. We were all of us back in the hands of adolescence, and I thought rebelliously: I am glad, for here is iced beer and a wireless set which will pick up the Empire programme from Daventry, and after all it is home, in the sense that we have been taught to know home, where we will soon forget the finer taste, the finer pleasure, the finer terror on which we might have built.''

Kicsit vontatott, de nagyon érdekes egy könyv

Actually a DNF. I don’t why this is listed as an adventure book. I’ve read almost half of it and all he has done is walk from village to village with low-paid natives doing everything for him. He has some recognition of the evils of imperial occupation and he’s somewhat wary of cultural stereotypes but it is still too dated and painful to finish this book.

Strange book describing a very remarkable experience.

After finishing this I had absorbed that Greene did this trip with his cousin, but it was a huge surprise to find out that his cousin was a 23-year old woman named Barbara. How could I have missed that? I searched and found out that there were only 35 mentions of "cousin", and that only one referred to "she" (which I must have misread). He does not mention her by name in the main text at all.

That's kind of bizarre; he talks about his carriers by name a lot, and we get to know them a little, so it's weird that she is hardly mentioned at all.

It turns out that Barbara used a hammock for most of the journey too, and that needed four carriers, so she had a very different experience. He wrote a book about this journey too, so I'm going to try to find it and read it also.

Finally, there's a book about retracing this journey: https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Devil-.... I'm looking forward to that too.

An extraordinary, rather pointless journey on foot through the unmapped back end of Liberia, with a crowd of porters, lots of rats, a case of whisky and a subconscious that pokes its head out now and then. As described elsewhere it's really two journeys, the physical and the psychological, and both are a little unsatisfying - not because they're poorly done, but because there's a dreaminess about them both. Anyway this is not really a practical travel book - there are inaccuracies, vaguenesses and omissions, and rather as much interest in the traveller as in the place, which is perfectly valid (Chatwin, Theroux...)

I'd have liked to hear more (and will do, if I read her published account) from cousin Barbara, who hardly gets a mention though according to this from Tim Butcher she saved his life. In his account he's just a bit knackered but pushes on.