Greene's description of a journey into the interior of Liberia. While there are a lot of assumptions about African culture and people, Greene is a more acute and honest observer of himself than many travelers. In my opinion, that makes this book worth reading as Greene interrogates the "travel adventure" impulse.

Not Greene's finest work by a long walk

I am normally a huge fan of Graham Greene. Few authors can offer such insight into the human condition as he can; however, this book was a struggle to get through and the few insights were buried in the countless pages of nothingness (or at least nothing overtly memorable). If Greene wanted to relay the monotony of a long walk, he succeeded.

Paul Theroux pedestrian introduction was also a horrific way to start the book. The only thing worth remembering from the introduction is that Greene possibly exaggerated the lack of maps (though Theroux manages to sound jealous about Greene's ability to vacation in unspoilt or virgin lands).

If The Lawless Roads is the journey which inspired The Power and the Glory and stands as a hazy reflection to the classic novel; then Journey Without Maps is a pale shadow to the inferior novel The Heart of the Matter (only inferior compared to The Power and the Glory). And that is the major difference, Journey Without Maps is travel literature and Greene recounts a vacation, not a journey with a mission or a purpose.

Full of fascinating detail about an Africa that probably no longer exists. Greene has a wonderful eye for detail and being able to sum up a character in a few concise words.
I missed the point of the odd seedy interludes set back in London, and the last chapter, with its stuff about Monrovia and the politicians, seems to wander off into some territory that left me lost.
The most mysterious thing about the book is the female 'cousin'. This was Barbara Greene (she's never named in the book) who went through everything good and bad that Greene himself went through yet is given barely more than a few sentences in the entire book. Blogger Nicholas Reid notes: "Barbara Greene wrote her own account of the journey called Land Benighted, later re-published under a different title as Too Late To Turn Back.."
Update
I've now read Barbara Greene's book, which is warmer in tone, treats the many dangers and difficulties surprisingly lightly, and gives a different insight into the journey and how it changed her from an unadventurous society girl into someone with considerable courage and strength.

Graham Greene 1936: en klassisk rese-skildring, där han traskar igenom stora delar av Liberia , med sin kvinnliga kusin o ett 20-tal bärare. Genom djungeln o ett stort antal äventyr; gin o tonic / kinin mot ständigt hotande malaria o feber, kvälls-whiskyn, o spaningar om stammar, byar, hyddor, våld, ritualer, fattigdom o elände i Afrikas djungler. Möjligtvis var det ett semi-spion uppdrag; att som britt åka från (brittisk kontrollerade) Sierra Leone, för att skildra inbördes-kampen i Liberia: ((USA-kontrollerade kusten o Monrovia, Presidenten o den grymme överste Davis i deras kamp mot Kru-befolkningen, som vägrar lyda centralmakten. )) Kanske skulle till och med Greene EGENTLIGEN lämna ett brev till Nimley, ledaren för Kru inne i nord-ost, för att sondera terrängen om Kru-stammen med britterna, skulle ta över makten. Dock lyckades Liberias regering, via överste Davis kortsluta hans rutt, o Greene nådde aldrig Nimley..

Herr Greene lyckas ändå på något sätt hanka sig fram, tar istället sikte på kusten, hantera all sin ”personal”, sköta rese-budgeten o samtidigt möta både presidenten, överste Davis, andra lokala storheter (doktorer, guldgrävare o udda karaktärer) på färden. Trippen avslutas i Monrovia, bland deprimerade väst-diplomater o stor lokal fattigdom, o den gemensamma aversionen mot Firestones stora gummi-plantager. Han spelar rollen som brittisk överklass imperialist ganska väl, när det behövs. Boken står sig någorlunda väl, imponerande att ta sig an en som här färd, efter journalist-år i Nottingham och innan kommande Brighton-skildring. Men det var en annan tid.

One of the few disappointing books I’ve read from Greene, chronicling his journey to Liberia. Nonfiction travel narratives to Africa written by Europeans pre-1950 are always very similar: it’s hot, the people are friendly but with a colonial submissiveness (except for the ones who want to rob or con the travelers), exotic animals are seen, exotic animals are killed, everyone comes down with an illness/fever at some point, conditions are dreadful, insects attack, rats attack, everyone is miserable, some tribal king or elder welcomes everyone to the village, the natives dance, everyone continues to be miserable, the return to “civilization” is welcomed, and the reflection that the journey into “the heart of darkness” (Greene even quotes the old Conrad cliché!) was worth it – even though one would never want to return.

The narrative was so typical that I found myself bored almost from the beginning. The lone worthy passage was the one from which Greene took his title, comparing his trip to Liberia with a psychoanalytic encounter with past pain and suffering: “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 may be imagined as saying, you can’t avoid it, there is a 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.”

If that's the case, then I'd rather go through therapy!

the pathos of black people planted down, without money or a home, on a coast of yellow fever and malaria

In many ways, the Coastal people of Liberia (the Western influenced) were much worse off than the untouched native people of the interior.

Journey without Maps, by Graham Greene is a travel book of Greene’s foray into Liberia in 1935, this book is a record of his trip on foot of 4 weeks and 350 miles from the border with Sierra Leone, in the NW – through the unmapped interior of Liberia to the South Coast and then onto the capital Monrovia.

……..it was the end of the worst boredom I had experienced

This was how Greene felt at the end of his journey. In fact, it is similar to how I felt at the end of this book. It was drab, boring - relentlessly so. However, there were some interesting bits at times.

Greene tackled the interior of Liberia with a team of ‘servants’ – who carried hammocks, boxes of whiskey, and other essential supplies through thick, wet, dense jungle. They encountered native settlements at the end of every day – each with undulating degrees of hospitality. The chiefs were largely a mad bunch – there were rats, small dangerous insects, snakes, a mulitidude of diseases not limited to fevers, dysentery, plague, and conflict.

The narrator also travelled with his female cousin – who wasn’t mentioned at all really - this puzzled me. He also reflected on his thoughts on his life experience throughout this trip – I didn’t find anything about him or the trip particularly illuminating. The description of the trip was only moderately interesting. In fact, this story was compared to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which I enjoyed. In my view, this comparison is ambitious as Conrad’s work was brilliant.

One positive for me, it kicked-started my interest in Liberia, this poverty-stricken, violent, West African country – with a Government based on the US Model, and populated by freed US slaves back in the day. This research was a massive learning experience, and one I have found to be very interesting indeed.

But as a travel book – nah. It really is a two star effort, but I’ll give it three because it initiated a vibrant flow of my research juices.

One other thing, this book also reinforced my love of the great indoors. We’ve spent millennia trying to make ourselves comfortable indoors to try and buck this trend is somehow unfathomable to my simple mind.

3 Stars

Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps is a book about colonialism before it was fashionable to write books “about” colonialism. He is simply writing about the world as he sees it. He is not denouncing or advocating racism. His writing lacks the self-consciousness of modern writers setting their stories in the past so as to try and make a point. However, he doesn’t shy away from the distinction between white and black or the fact that he is an outsider. For him these are simply facts: white and black are different, neither better nor worse, just different. This is refreshing, as most modern writers paint themselves with the biased brush of posterity when exploring race relations. However, the work is autobiographical and apparently Greene thought he didn’t really have to bothered with any character development. So despite the refreshing take on race, the reader is very alienated from the action.

Great sense of adventure and ground breaking for that time. True exploration of the unknown.

Una aventura narrada con tan poca emoción deja de ser una aventura.
Graham Greene nos narra su viaje por la África colonial de manera tan insulsa que pierde todo su interés.
Más que una novela es un diario de a bordo insulso.
No la recomiendo para nada.

IT WAS AMAZING.

Graham Greene’s account of his 1935 trek across Liberia, 350 miles or so, made by a man who had not previously been outside of Europe. He was accompanied, in fairness, by a legion of porters and guides and by his cousin Barbara, though she was actually carried in a four-man hammock whilst he walked. GG initially comments in the book that he was “a little scared” of the prospect of the journey and “very grateful” to Barbara for agreeing to accompany him, though by the end he comments they could barely talk without arguing, something that he put down to exhaustion and illness on his part. Even with the porters and guides, this was an extremely arduous journey, and Greene nearly died of “fever” in its latter stages.

Greene’s decision to make the trek perhaps represented a victory for curiosity over fear, since he says early on that he had phobias about birds, bats and moths, and a fear of rats. This last wasn’t a phobia though, since it is rational to be afraid of rats! Lying in bed at night in the total darkness of African huts, Greene can hear the rats scurrying about around him. He initially found this unnerving (as I would have) but he gradually got used to it, assisted by copious amounts of whisky.

"But there are times of impatience, when one is less content to rest at the urban stage, when one is willing to suffer some discomfort for the chance of finding – there are a thousand names for it, King Solomon’s Mines, the ‘heart of darkness’ if one is romantically inclined, or more simply, as Herr Heuser puts it in his African novel, The Inner Journey, one’s place in time, based on a knowledge not only of one’s present but of the past from which one has emerged."

Greene seems to have chosen Liberia because, at the time, it was one of only two African countries not ruled by white men. You could say it had been semi-colonised though, as the country was basically created as a “return to Africa” project for black Americans. These “Americo-Liberians” were set apart from the local African people. They lived along the coast, formed the country’s political elite and generally ignored the interior. It was the interior that attracted Greene, as an Africa as far removed as possible from outside influences.

Personally I thought this was a good read, if a tad slow at times. The edition I read had an Introduction by Tim Butcher, in which he highlights how the “journey without maps” had not just a literal meaning but for Greene also described “a metaphysical trip searching inside himself.” That’s an excellent way of putting it. Personally I found all the descriptions amazing. The inhabitants of the villages are incredibly poor and absolutely riddled with disease, and they live in fear of what Greene calls the village “devils” – sorcerers. Nevertheless Greene forms a favourable view of the culture of the interior because of the people’s adherence to old traditions of honesty and hospitality. He is less impressed by the “civilised” coastal settlements but still compares these favourably with the situation in countries under colonial rule.

One impression I had was the honesty of Greene’s descriptions – he describes what he sees and sets down his impressions whether good or bad. African villagers, Americo-Liberians and expatriate whites all get the same treatment, which is at times quite incisive.

I’m planning to read Barbara Greene’s account of the journey, to get a comparison, although I might take a couple of short diversions before doing so.

Graham Greene is, of course, more celebrated for his fiction than for anything else, but this, a book of travel writing as he made his way through Sierra Leone and Liberia, is a masterpiece of the genre and as worth reading today as when it was published. I haven't visited either of these countries myself, but I am familiar with the discomforts of exploring Africa - I wove my way from Ghana to South Africa overland more than a decade ago - and so much of what Greene writes rings true: the illness, the dirt, the lack of food, but also the warmth of the people he met, and the beauty of the places he saw.