WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW...
To learn a place is like getting to know a person,’ writes Andrew Solomon in this collection of essays covering 25 years of magazine assignments across the globe.
An award-winning American author, Solomon talks to people in Greenland about mental illness and to former political prisoners in Myanmar, while in Afghanistan he observes a country ‘awakening after the Taliban’. Often he has a rollicking time along the way. Far And Away is literary journalism at its crackling best.
The tone of the essays oscillates between horror (Rwanda and Cambodia) and humour. He treks through Makira, in the Solomon Islands, merrily saying ‘Hi!’ to friendly villagers. It later emerges that the word means ‘copulate’ in the local tongue. Part of the joy of this kind of book is that one can argue with opinions. I disagreed with Solomon’s assessments of food in China, and his views on the topic led him, uncharacteristically, to state the obvious: ‘The best food in China is not necessarily in the splashiest places.’
He has an eye for the telling phrase. Off the Gold Coast he swims in a ‘muscular current’, and in Zambia’s Luangwa Valley, tracking the elusive shoebill bird, he notes ‘the voracious jungle appetite’ of the land. One learns a lot about the author: his childhood, his depression, his same-sex marriage, his young children and the love affair with England born when he came over as a graduate student.
His own emotional range lends texture to Far And Away: a nearly disastrous scuba dive in Australia contrasts with transcendent happiness in Mongolia. There are two keys to success in this genre: specificity and perspective. Solomon understands this, perhaps intuitively. He takes the long view, as a writer should. ‘History is rife with waves of joyful transformation followed by descent into horror.’
These pages foster the embrace of diversity. ‘I have come to believe,’ Solomon writes, ‘in travel’s political importance, that encouraging a nation’s citizenry to travel may be as important as encouraging school attendance, environmental conservation or national thrift.’ Indeed.