[I’m posting this note out of love for the three books that are the subject of my series “3 Great Thematic Travelogues.” I wrote it about a month ago before the U.S. escalated its attack on Canada. This is likely my last post in the series.]
This is the eighth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread three of my favorite travel books – Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999), and Lawrence Osborne’s The Wet and the Dry (2013) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their use of the first person.One aspect of these three great books that I relish immensely is their subjectivity. All three are written in the first person major. All three are accounts of personal experience, which, for me, is the most real form of writing. All three are suffused with the personalities of their authors. Who are they? What are they like? How do they represent themselves?
They don’t expressly describe themselves. I have no idea from their writing what they look like. There’s a tiny photo of Osborne on the back cover of The Wet and the Dry. He looks a bit like Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris. Of the three, he’s the most psychologically complex. He’s a drinker and a brooder and a loner. That’s his core identity. He reveals more of his personal background than the other two – his alcoholic mom, whom he loves, his alcoholic great-uncle, who “stormed around the world on ‘business’ liquoring himself at a thousand bars,” his girlfriend Elena “in all her blonde and oddly Nordic magnificence.” He describes growing up in the English suburb of Haywards Heath (“Alcohol hovered in the air as an independent presence”). He shows himself in unflattering circumstances such as the time he woke up in his room at the Fairmont Bab al Bahr, in Abu Dhabi, in the same clothes he’d been wearing for weeks, and “with a headache so severe that I had to lie there for some time and try to remember where I had been the night before.” It turns out the night before he’d been so intoxicated he’d dived fully clothed into the hotel pool. The staff had to fish him out and carry him to his room.
Deakin and Macfarlane aren’t nearly as wild as that. In The Old Ways, Macfarlane has a drink of whisky or gin when he’s with friends, but we never see him totally wasted. In Waterlog, Deakin drinks tea or hot chocolate. I don’t ever recall him imbibing an alcoholic drink. I say they’re not wild, but they do take risks. Deakin swims in rivers and pools where there are eels and pike. He also descends into Hell Gate – one of the book’s most memorable scenes:
Courage up, I returned to the turbulent rim of the gorge and did what I knew might be an unwise thing. I couldn’t help it. I began to slide into the mouth of the abyss itself. I found myself in the first of a series of smooth limestone cups four or five feet in diameter and anything between three and five feet deep, stepped at an acute angle down a flooded gulley of hollowed limestone that spiralled into the unknown. In the low light, the smooth, wet walls were a beautiful aquamarine, their shining surface intricately pock-marked like the surface of the moon. All my instincts were to hold on, but to what? The ice and the water had polished everything perfectly. The torrent continually sought to sweep me with it, and so I slithered and climbed down Hell Gill’s dim, glistening insides, through a succession of cold baths, in one long primal scream.
Macfarlane takes risks, too. He walks ancient footpaths in the West Bank of Palestine where there’s danger of both Palestinian and Israeli gunfire. On a mountain in Scotland, he follows a trail of footprints in the snow that lead him and his companions into grave trouble:
Then the ledge narrowed to no ledge at all; just heather and rock, perhaps twenty degrees off the vertical. By now we had stopped speaking, concentrating on each handhold and foothold. Below was the fall, behind us an almost irreversible route, and ahead of us apparently untraversable ground – across which the footprints padded; the same regular spacing, the same enticing trail. I stopped. The others stopped in turn behind me. I felt sick. The slop and douse of adrenalin, panic spliced with moments of calm, pinpricks of fright in my temples. In the valley below us I could see normal life continuing: the flash of sun from a car’s windscreen as it moved along the road, a walker on the loch-side path, a gull banking over birch trees.
Deakin and Macfarlane are naturalists – brilliant describers of birds, animals, trees, flowers, insects, sunlight. Osborne is not. His topography consists of bars, the darker the better. He’s very much at home there. Here’s his description of the Cap d’Or in Cairo:
I love the tables here piled with nutshells, the smell of dogs and oily ful, and the sinister bar with its filthy bottles. The floors crunchy with the same pistachio shells. The men dishevelled and worn-down looking, in their cheap leather jackets and woolly hats. There is no question that Cap d’Or is a great bar of a certain kind because there is no sexuality, no women, no flirting, no frivolity, no beauty, no cuisine on the side, no clocks, no well-dressed bohemians and pretty young men with nothing to do. It’s a place of quiet but pungent pessimism, where the drinker at best can divert himself with a backgammon board but where he usually sinks sweetly into his own meditations.
Macfarlane is a connoisseur of light:
Those early-day miles were magical, up and down hills, through beech and coppice hazel woods, with a marine light in the beech woods that gave the feeling of walking in cool water.
A scorching band of low white light to seaward; a thin magnesium burn-line.
The light had modified again, from nacreous to granular to dense.
Light quibbling on the swell.
Each dip of the oars set loose a storm of light: a swarm of fireflies, a wind-curl of fire-leaves outlighting the vortices.
The sunlight fell hard as timber.
A gold-grey flutter of light from the fire.
Sunlight, sifted by foliage, cross-hatched the path.
The understorey of the forest was thickened with rhododendron, whose leaves shone bronze where the full light caught them.
Heaps of old black oily snow by the sides of the roads; the sky low and overcast; a hidden sun shedding a weak and eely light.
The paths of the Downs compelled Ravilious’s imagination, and so did the light: falling as white on green, distinctive for its radiance, possessing the combined pearlescence of chalk, grass blades and a proximate sea.
Sunlight curled and pooled on the shell of a blue-black beetle dragging and bumping itself towards the monastery.
Deakin is a connoisseur of water:
Breast-stroking up and down the thirty yards of clear, green water, I nosed along, eyes just at water level. The frog’s-eye view of rain on the moat was magnificent.
Water rushed about everywhere here, and amongst the remains of a settlement I found a spring inside a kind of stone temple covered in ferns. I went down to drink from it, and felt its atmosphere and power.
I hastened into the deliciously soft, warm water and set about swimming my mile: 56 lengths of the 30-yard pool.
I was welcomed by the superintendent, changed in an enclosure where everyone just left their clothes trustingly on a peg or a wooden bench, and went off the springboard for a long swim in the glassy, sweet-smelling springwater.
Diving naked into a clear, black river pool off old-fashioned coconut-matted boards is not a pleasure that comes along every day.
The Fowey River is 40 feet deep at high tide, and I began to feel the depth of the water beneath me.
Once in the sea, though, you begin to relax and lose yourself in the rhythm, feeling the texture of the water, opening up your lungs and breathing deeper, becoming aquatic.
The water was grained with silt, like an old photograph.
I stripped and dived in. It was so cold, I might have flung myself into a bed of nettles. Then came the heady rush of the endorphins, or “endolphins” as a friend once called them, the natural opiates with which the body anaesthetises itself against the cold, and the adrenaline.
The sleek, black water tasted fresh and peaty as I leant into the shuddering current with each new stroke in the deep, high-sided cauldron.
Feeling no modesty before the deer, I entered the ineffable softness of Lochan Mic-a-phi and crossed straight over it. If some of the Fen rivers were gin clear, this was like swimming through single malt whisky. It was deep and refreshing, but by no means cold; somewhere in the mid-sixties Fahrenheit. The loch turned my body to the dull gold of a carp, and bore me up as if in water-wings, as I returned across two hundred yards of the finest water in the world, tasting it at intervals. To feel its balmy softness in every limb, at every stroke, was a kind of heaven.
When swimmers talk of fast or slow water, this is the sort of thing they mean. The absence of wavelets, or other bathers, means you can breathe and move in perfect rhythm, so the music takes over. Mind and body go off somewhere together in unselfconscious bliss, and the lengths seems to swim themselves. The blood sings, the water yields; you are in a state of grace, and every breath gets deeper, more satisfying. You hunker down and bury yourself in the water as though you have lived in it all your life, as though you were born in it, and thoughts come lightly and easily as you swing up and down in the blue.
I swam through the cold, polished water, each stroke a perfect arc of tiny bubbles, everything in equilibrium.
Deakin and Macfarlane have similar sensibilities. Both love nature. Both spend substantial portions of their days exploring it. Osborne isn’t a naturalist. His natural milieu is the bar, the hotel, the café. He loves wandering the back alleys of ancient cities – Beirut, Istanbul, Cairo. He’s a connoisseur of alcohol:
In Milan that summer, as the temperature reached almost ninety-five every day in the deserted streets and squares around the hotel, I forced myself to stop dreaming of the fjords of Norway and the ice hotels of the Arctic Circle and, gritting my teeth, went instead to the lounge where gin and tonics were served to the guests of the Town House Galleria from a moving tray equipped with buckets of ice, lemon rinds, and glass stir sticks. I liked to go at an hour when I knew the place would be empty, and this movable bar would be for me and me alone. The tall windows would be opened an inch, the gauze curtains flapping, the flowers wilting on the restaurant tables. The drinks trolley had stoppered crystal flagons of unnamed cognac, a bowl of marinated olives, Angostura bitters, and bottles of Fernet. It was like being in a luxury hospital where, because you are paying so much, you are entitled to drink yourself to death privately. You go right ahead, because you are human and drink is sweet.
Deakin has more humour in him than the other two. The above quip about “endolphins” is a good example. I’ve used it myself a few times when I’ve been out swimming with friends in cold water and it never fails to get a laugh. Another example – his story about two guys in a pub:
Another of the swimmers’ tales was about Jeffrey Bernard and the actor John Le Mesurier. They were old drinking companions and would invent ever more absurd private games to amuse themselves secretly in company. A long-running favourite was to see which of them could casually insert the most outrageous clichés into a conversation undetected by anyone else. They had entered a pub in a small Devon seaside resort, and remarked to the landlord how inviting the sea looked that day. “Ah yes,” he said, “but it can be treacherous. Only last week, a young boy went swimming out there and drowned.” Everyone in the pub fell into a respectful silence, and, after a pause, Le Mesurier said, “Well, it just goes to show, you can’t be too careful,” at which Bernard snorted loudly into his glass, burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter, and the pair were obliged to leave, never to return.
Are these books self-portraits? Yes, of course. They’re chronicles of personal experience. Each book is a form of journal, recording what the authors see and do in detail after glorious detail. Along the way, stuff happens that reveals aspects of their character: Macfarlane’s bike accident (“I had cracked a rib, possibly two, but this seemed a minor impediment to walking”); Macfarlane at his grandfather’s funeral (“I nearly cried, and could not tell why I didn’t”); Macfarlane in danger on the icy slope of a mountain in Scotland (“I felt sick. The slop and douse of adrenalin, panic spliced with moments of hovering calm, pinpricks of fright in my temples”); Deakin’s fear of unknown things in the deep (“Swimming up to the tangle of tree roots in deep water, I experienced one of those sudden intimations of dread, known to all wild swimmers, about what could be lurking beneath the surface”); Deakin in a wild, dark mood after sweating traffic for hours on the way down through Somerset (“It was one of several moments when I began seriously to question the whole outlandish project”); Osborne with his girlfriend (“Elena crawled on top of me and said, ‘Drink or amore? Which one first?’ Amore, then, but soon after the drink”); Osborne in Islamabad (“In one of the most dangerous and alcohol-hostile countries in the world, I wondered what it would be like to intoxicate oneself”); Osborne alone in his room at the Windsor Hotel in Cairo, remembering his mother (“I made a silent toast to my mother, who would have enjoyed drinking it with me in that fusty, darkened room where the shutters were falling off their hinges”).
One thing all three authors have in common: their voices on the page are mesmerizing. I enjoy their company immensely.
Postscript, August 27, 2026: I've started a new blog called Acts of Attention.
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