What's Your Favourite Travel Book?
newsletter no. 27 August 2008

A travel diary should be full of sensations, a guidebook devoid of them. So wrote Stendhal almost two centuries ago. Today most of us still take the wandering twins with us on holiday. We want Lonely Planet's hard facts to steer us towards a comfortable bed. But we need an adventurous first-person travelogue to thrill us out of our comfort zone and to stimulate our imaginations.

I also want to let you know that the mighty Woodhopper, the light, white flying machine which I hand-built on Crete, found the perfect new home last week. A pleasant, humble and deliciously dotty enthusiast, Martin Aubrey bought it for his extensive ultralight collection (he already owns FIFTY other ‘antique’ aeroplanes). He and his bubbly and tolerant wife Penny helped me to extract it from my Dorset garage and load it onto their trailer. The Woodhopper will be displayed at their Classic Ultralight Heritage Museum, which they plan to open in north Wales next year. More news on that in due course.
Apart from dealing in one-use flying machines, I’ve been involved with publicity events around the publication of Magic Bus in French -- cliquez ici pour les pages français -- and the republication in the UK, States and Canada of Stalin’s Nose, The Oatmeal Ark, Under the Dragon and Next Exit Magic Kingdom.  A flight of lofty adjectives took wing in France last month when Paris Match called me ‘le facétieux -- impish and mischevious — Rory’ (I can’t think why...).  It continued in Canada when the Toronto Sun ventured that I am ‘the greatest Canadian travel writer Canada has never heard of’ (my London bank manager must be Canadian too — he’s not read any of my books either).  In the UK William Dalrymple wrote a generous article in Prospect on travel writing and — err — me.

Happy hols, adventurous reading!

yours ever,

Rory

Yes dear Readers, I'm Still Alive
newsletter no. 26 june 2008

This summer Wanderlust magazine marks the republication of my first book Stalin’s Nose on their Classic Journey page, making me their first living Classic Traveller (all the previous authors having checked out of life’s hotel and made their ultimate journey).  

This welcome (but premature) accolade reminds me of a story by fellow scribbler Dea Birkett.  A couple of years ago her book Spinsters Abroad was bought by Sutton as a launch title in their History Classics series. Excited, Dea called Sutton's publicity person to ask what they had lined up in the way of interviews. ‘God -- you're alive!’ was the reply. ‘I’ve never dealt with a live author before.'  Other writers included Noel Barber (The Black Hole of Calcutta) and Leonard Cottrell (Life Under the Pharaohs) -- all male and all dead. Sadly, the lack of experience dealing with the living did not help in promotion. But Dea’s consolation was the knowledge that she had become a living classic....

Likewise, my Wanderlust accolade doesn’t seem to carry much weight in Penguin’s editorial office (nor in fact does it move my bank manager).  That publisher has decided to let Falling for Icarus drop out-of-print.  Times are tough in the book world, and Falling for Icarus simply hasn’t been ticking enough boxes for Pearson’s bean counters.  The paradox is that — as all new copies are now sold out — second-hand copies of the paperback are selling on Amazon’s Marketplace for between £12 and £60!  Unfortunately for me — and Penguin — none of that dosh is shared with us.

You may not be able to buy the book for under £12, but you can try to buy the aeroplane for 99p!  Many of you know about my Woodhopper, the flying machine which I hand-built on Crete, the story of which is told in Falling for Icarus. Well, I have to clear out the house before our move to Berlin at the end of next month, and the new tenants don’t want a flying machine in the garage (how unimaginative...).  So sadly the Woodhopper has to go — through eBay!  I've opened the bidding today at 99p and want to draw your attention to sale -- not least because half the money raised will be donated to cancer home care charities.  

Click here for the link to eBay.

Apart from dealing in one-use flying machines, I’ve been involved with publicity events around the publication of Magic Bus in French -- cliquez ici pour les pages français -- and the republication in the UK, States and Canada of Stalin’s Nose, The Oatmeal Ark, Under the Dragon and Next Exit Magic Kingdom.  A flight of lofty adjectives took wing in France last week when Paris Match called me ‘le facétieux -- impish and mischevious — Rory’ (I can’t think why...).  It continued in Canada when the Toronto Sun ventured that I am ‘the greatest Canadian travel writer Canada has never heard of’ (my London bank manager must be Canadian too — he’s not read any of my books either).  In the UK William Dalrymple brought things down to earth with his Prospect article on travel writing and — err — me.

For those of you in and around Paris in late June, please note that the travel writing course which I teach with Dea Birkett will be held on Saturday 28th June at Shakespeare and Company. The next London Workshop is scheduled for Saturday 20th September and we’re back in Dublin on 22nd November.  These days are stimulating, fun, productive — and successful!  Three students have recently had their first travel articles published -- in the Mail on Sunday — and one has been short listed for the Bradt/Independent on Sunday Travel Writing Competition.  Hurrah for them!  If you'd like to join us, please check out

http://www.travelworkshops.co.uk

yours ever,

Rory

The Best Seller Business
newsletter no. 21 spring 2008

Last summer I was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The Society, founded by George IV in 1820, exists to 'reward literary merit and excite literary talent'. I don't know about the reward but I certainly was excited by the invitation, and accepted it. Coleridge was an early Fellow, as were Yeats, Shaw, Kipling and Hardy. So on a rainy Tuesday at Somerset House in London, I along with the other new Fellows stepped forward to sign the roll book with either Dicken's quill or Byron's pen!

These days the vast majority of authors -- myself included -- have to contend with publishers' obsession with best seller lists. It's an obsession that not only distorts the market, it challenges a writer's perception of what a good book is. As Fay Weldon put it, today 'bestseller' betokens artistic success. Popularity becomes the measuring stick. A 'good' book is one which sells.

Weldon went on,'the danger for writers who continue to aspire to 'good' in the old sense is that they won't get published at all or, if they are, it will be with miserable print runs'. In the name of corporate profits, the synopses that authors now 'contrive and have approved before they begin a commissioned book must please the marketing rather than the editorial department of their publisher'. As a result, an editor's decision to publish an original or risky book is often overturned, the creative imagination withers...life gets dull for the writer and the reader...audiences fall and the young stick iPods in the ears and look away. I mention this phenomena for two reasons. First, to draw your attention to Wildwood, a remarkable 'journey through trees' which Roger Deakin wrote over seven years, with two fingers put up to the market, which I've included in my Guardian Unlimited Travel Books of the Year column

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2007/dec/03/travelbooks.christmasnewyear

and second, to illustrate how much it means to me to have been invited to become a Fellow of the RSL. In the same way that my heart is lifted by the messages and email I receive through the website from you, the RSL recognition reminds me that the Top Ten list isn't the-be-all-and-end-all of literary merit, and encourages me to keep writing true to my own view of the world.

I want to thank everyone who has visited the Asia Overland hippie trail pages of the site and sent me suggestions, photographs and links. There are now almost 300 Sixties and Seventies trailphotos on the flickr trail 'veterans' forum (where former travelling companions have begun to meet again). As most of you know, I've created the site to enable travellers -- both armchair and road-worn -- to relive the journey. Just click on hippie trail above then follow the arrow route to see original Sixties and Seventies photos plus video clips as well as extracts from the book.

For people in and around these islands, please note that the travel writing course which I teach with fellow scribbler Dea Birkett will next be held on Saturday 9th February (Dublin) and 1st March 2008 (London). Then on 28th June we'll running another at Shakespeare and Company in Paris. These Saturday workshops are stimulating, fun and productive and, if you'd like to join us, please check out

http://www.travelworkshops.co.uk

Before I sign off I should perhaps admit that I'm not totally immune to best seller lists. This month Magic Bus is no. 1 on the New Age site

http://www.new-age.co.uk/New-age-books.htm

so hurrah!

yours ever,

Rory

 
A Gift
newsletter no. 20  summer 2007

My apologies for being such a poor correspondent these last few months. The words have been flowing into the next book rather than the newsletter.  

But the lengthy silence does means there’s much news to report.  
    
First, a double delight, to be celebrated in both English and French.  IB Tauris – a highly respected and growing UK publisher – are to republish my first four books.  Stalin’s Nose, The Oatmeal Ark, Under the Dragon and Next Exit Magic Kingdom will reappear as Tauris Parke paperbacks in the UK and US next year (with an added extra – details to be revealed in the next newsletter).  Also later this year the adventurous Parisian publishing house Editions Hoëbeke will launch the French translation of Magic Bus.  C’est formidable!

Second, I’ve started writing a monthly travel book review column for the on-line edition of the Guardian Unlimited. My latest review of Cees Nooteboom’s masterful Nomad's Hotel heads the home page today.   I’ve been told that readers of the review will be able to enter a competition to win a complete set of the Penguin Great Journeys series (I don’t see it up there yet but hope springs eternal).  Do check it out at either at:

http://travel.guardian.co.uk/

or
 
http://travel.guardian.co.uk/tag/rorymaclean

         Many thanks to those of you who have enquired about the travel writing course which I teach with fellow scribbler Dea Birkett in London.  These Saturday workshops are stimulating, fun and productive. This spring’s dates include March 3, March 17, May 12 and June 9.  If you'd like to join us, please go to www.deabirkett.com or email Dea at travelworkshops@deabirkett.com.  For those foolish enough to want to spend more than a day in my company, in November I’ll be teaching a week long travel writing workshop at the Arvon Foundation – http://www.arvonfoundation.org

        Finally, I want to share a story with you.

        Last month I gave a talk on Magic Bus and the hippie trail at London’s Royal Geographical Society -- to an audience of 600!  The evening was thrilling for me, as well as a privilege.  

         Earlier that day I had been given a most wonderful book; The Gift by Lewis Hyde.  Hyde is an American poet who addresses the question of how an artist maintains themselves in the world of money, when the essential part of what an artist does cannot be bought or sold.  'In a climate where we know the price of everything and the value of nothing, it offers us an account of those few, essential aspects of human experience that transcend commodity' wrote one reviewer.

         The work so moved that I began copying quotes from it -- across the top of my RGS lecture notes.  'The gifted artist contains the vitality of his gift within the work, and thereby shares it with others.  Furthermore, works we come to treasure are those which transmit that vitality and revive the soul'.

         An hour to before my talk, I had gone to the V+A  to calm my nerves. I  found myself in the sculpture gallery where a sculptor was working on a small clay copy of a most evocative 19th century, marble statue of Eve.  Again and again he held the small clay model up against the marble, adjusting the line of the shoulder or curve of the back.  I had The Gift in my hand.  I hesitated but then, buoyed by the approaching lecture, walked up to him and asked if I could read him a quotation.  He said yes.  And I did.  I read him the words about containing the vitality of the gift.

        'Well said' he replied, with typical English understatement, but I cared not a jot; for I was there to share, and I had done it.  I'm sure the words -- or at least their meaning -- will stay with him.

yours ever,

 

Rory

    This week I'm in a special place, that world apart. I love being here; it is my deserted Canadian lake, my sunny, unending Italian lunch, my vista from the top of Ben Nevis. It is the place in the world where I am most happy.

     I'm here in my study conjuring up the next book. I have the idea. I've found its emotional core. I'm drawing into the mix current affairs, popular concerns and questions about identity. I am imagining possibilities before stepping out the front door.

     As with all my books it will be a personal work; part journey part memoir, with perhaps a glimpse of a world as we wish it could be. I'll produce no coldly objective documentary. Long ago travel writing betrayed that objectivity is a chimera. Uniquely, outside autobiography, the travel writer acknowledges his or her subjectivity. As Colin Thubron wrote, 'Subjectivity is implicit in the first-person "I" who roams his (or her) written landscape. The late Nicolas Bouvier, the Continent's finest travel writer, expressed the same view when he said, 'I move around my page like I move around the world.'

copyright cambridgejones.com

     It's proving to be a memorable summer aboard the bus, not least because I had dinner with the gentle, hilarious and incomparable poet Roger McGough.

     News first of Magic Bus. Viking published it at the end of June. At the end of July, BBC Radio 4 broadcast it as a Book of the Week. The wonderful Kerry Shale, with over 200 radio plays, three Sony awards plus all of Bill Bryson's books and Life of Pi to his credit, was the reader. Anyone who missed the transmissions, lives beyond The Pale or finds themselves at a loose end on the net, can hear them again at
 www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/book_week.shtml 

     This month I'm speaking at the Edinburgh Book Festival where I'll be showing some of the glorious, evocative Sixties and Seventies travel photographs which I've been loaned by trail "veterans": wide-eyed passengers, decrepit London buses, young lovers and monuments destroyed by wars in a region swept through extraordinary changes since the Summer of Love.

     Can you believe it? Yesterday I started insulating the loft. "Cold winter coming," say the farmers in our corner of Dorset, looking at the sky, sucking on their teeth. I used to be in awe their pronouncements, moved by the intuition of modern men and women still in touch with the forces of nature. Until I asked one of them how he learnt to read the signs. "What signs?" he answered me. "I just watch the weather report at the end of the ten o'clock news."

     Before the chilly weather sets in, there's a hot summer aboard the bus. Magic Bus is published at the end of this month. I'm speaking at the Guardian Hay Book Festival on 4th June, the Shakespeare and Company "Travel in Words" celebration in Paris on 15th June and at the ICA in London on 29th June. In August I'll be at Edinburgh where -- as at the other festivals -- I'll be showing some of the glorious, evocative Sixties and Seventies travel photographs which I've been loaned by trail "veterans": wide-eyed passengers, decrepit London buses, young lovers and monuments destroyed by wars in a region swept through extraordinary changes since the Summer of Love. The Sunday Times Magazine is running a selection of the images -- along with my story of the journey that changed the way we travel the world -- on 18th June.

     'Now that you've finished your book what are you going to do?' asked my brother. 'Lie on the beach?'

     Magic Bus is finished. Yesterday the proof-read manuscript was sent to the typesetter. The jacket has been designed and the subtitle ('On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India') agreed. BBC Radio 4 has chosen it for Book of the Week. Publication is set for June 29th. But finished? Not quite yet.

     For one thing there are the rights clearances. Pop music was among the most important creations of the 1960s. Lyrics inspired, guided -- or in some cases misguided -- that generation and their search for a new way of living. I heard this sentiment expressed again and again during my research. In an early issue of the Village Voice I read of a Dylan debut performance, 'His voice is crude, his appearance scruffy and as a performer he lacks all traces of a professional. But one brief listening to the emotional understatement in his voice emphasizes the power of his lyrics and his genuine concern for the state of the world.' As far as I'm concerned, no book can be written about the Sixties without quoting -- or paraphrasing -- lyrics.

     I'm just home from France. I was invited to Paris to give a reading at Shakespeare and Company, the tumbledown American bookshop on the Left Bank. I say 'at' Shakespeare and Company; 'outside' would be more accurate. On rue de la Bucherie, surrounded by about sixty book lovers and bemused tourists, between the peels of Notre Dame's bells and the heckling of passing down-and-outs, I read aloud from Falling for Icarus.

     Shakespeare and Company opened its doors in 1921. From here Europe first heard of new American writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald and -- after the war -- Ginsberg and the Beats. Its owner Sylvia Beach published Joyce's Ulysses when no one else would take the risk. Fifty-five years ago George Whitman, an east coast vagabond-cum-bibliophile, bought this 'little rag-and-bone shop of the heart'. Since then, as well as selling millions of English-language books, he has given home to some 50,000 poets, novelists and students.

     I lie to myself. I tell myself great big porkers. It's the way I write books.

     My working day isn't unusual. I sit down at my desk -- after getting up and dressing three-year-old Finn and walking the dog around the village -- around 8.30am. I jump up to make tea every forty minutes or so but, apart from a short hour's lunch, I tend to work straight through until about 5.30pm.

     But by that time I'm exhausted. I feel as if -- and I like this feeling -- the energy of eight hours of my One-and-Only-Life has been drained out of me and impressed into the day's pages. So to enable myself rise up the next morning I begin to lie.

     It's Easter Saturday. Katrin is out for a Girls' Evening. Finn is drifting away toward the Land of Nod. And I've snapped open a cool Kronenbourg to sit down and write this month's newsletter.

     I'm not used to writing with a drink. Maximol vitamin supplements, Gui Pi Wan Chinese herbs and chocolate Hob Nobs are all central to the creative process for me, especially being just a few weeks away from completing the revised first draft of Magic Bus. But as a rule intoxicants do not stimulate my productivity. In fact, if I open a third bottle of beer this evening I'm as likely to fall asleep under my desk as finish the newsletter. Which is as a bit of a paradox given that I'm writing about the Sixties hippie trail, hashish, LSD, Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg.

     But I do want to write this month about alcohol, and celebration (though perhaps not 'cosmic consciousness'). Falling for Icarus will be published in paperback by Penguin in April and to mark the occasion you all are invited to the London launch.

     If I climb on top of my desk and lift my eyes above the crumpled notepads and empty cookie wrappers, I can see on the horizon the End of the Road. At Last. I'm 95,000 words along my hippie trail journey, with only one chapter and ten days left to complete the first draft. Of course there are three or four rewrites to come, but finishing the first draft is for me the most moving milestone along the route. The conceiving and writing of this first stage of Magic Bus has been -- as with my other books -- emotional and draining (as illustrated by my consumption of gallons of Greek coffee and acres of chocolate biscuits). Subsequent drafts will depend more on analytical thought, hence engage the heart less (and reduce my caffeine and fast-sugar needs). In a couple of weeks the time for craftsmanship will come, with extensive revision, with the aspiration of living up to Flaubert's dictate that prose is like hair that shines with combing.

Hence I've been lax in writing new Newsletters, for which many apologies. These last months I seem to have done little other than write. Real Life has continued to unfold beyond the confines of my study, or so I've been informed. Finn is now two-and-a-half years old, Tess the Golden Retriever just turned seven and George W. Bush has been re-elected (in case you too missed the news). 

     Few annual events shake me as much as the Edinburgh Book Festival -- except perhaps my attempts to complete a tax return. I never fail to Learn at the Festival, as well as this year to laugh with Jan Morris, to shake hands with Robert McCrum and to meet Malise Ruthven, a leading authority on Islam and author of the essential A Fury for God. But the writer who most shook me was the Scottish exile and intellectual nomad Kenneth White. White left the UK in 1967 to settle in France and his original and exploratory books have won some of that country's most prestigious literary prizes. Yet he's little known in Scotland, and almost unheard of in England. Which is our great loss. Last Saturday in a talk on his essay Writing the Road he said, 'The individual mind needs a literature that widens perspective and opens hearts.' His latest 'waybook' is such a work, and it now sits on my desk alongside Hesse, Robert Byron and Kerouac.

     In this month's newsletter I'm not going to babble on about Rory's Top 5s on the Penguin website or the generous Greek correspondent who has offered to bring me a jar of incomparable Cretan mountain thyme honey when he's next in the UK. Instead I'm posting below my article -- On Death and Daedalus -- which appeared in The Times in May. Those of you who didn't catch it then may be interested in reading more about the story behind Falling for Icarus: A Journey among the Cretans (which has just been published by Viking in the UK). Those of you who did see it, apologies for this repetition.

     As I've said before in the newsletter, I wouldn't write books if I couldn't reach or be reached by readers; This Means You. Later this summer I'll be appearing at the Edinburgh Book Festival (Thursday 26 August) and at the Cheltenham Literature Festival (Wednesday 13 October). I hope that I'll see some of you there. But whether you can come or not, please do feel free to email me about Icarus or travel writing or even the cost of aviation fuel in Crete. I'd love to hear from you -- as always.

yours ever,

Rory

I just have to tell you the news. It's been such a Greek day ­ which started almost three years ago. After building and flying my aeroplane on Crete, I packed up for the drive home to the UK. The flying machine's fuselage fitted neatly on top of my car but the wings were a problem.

"Don't even think of carrying them back to England," insisted my friend Jorgos. He lowered his voice as he always did at moments of inspiration. "My sister works at the fruit co-operative in Hania. She'll truck your wings to Covent Garden on top of the next load of oranges ­- for free." 

It was a helpful suggestion, especially as each wing was 17 feet long and tended to lift off the roof rack when I drove above 18 mph. So I agreed, dropped off the wings at Jorgos' brother's warehouse and headed for home.

'Hello? Anyone home?' 

Well, I am -- at last.  Over the past four months I've confronted Turkish buses and Iranian hospitality, armed Afghan warlords and naked Indian sadhus. I've stuck my toe in the Bosphorus and the Euphrates. I've watched the sun rise over the Ganges and set behind the Himalayas. I've been humbled by tireless aid workers in Kabul, avoided a band of Maoists tour guides in Pokhara and sung along with Nepal's most dissolute 'sixties rock band. I've travelled by land over 10,000 kilometres from Istanbul to Kathmandu, following the original hippie/Asia Overland trail. 

So now the real journey can begin -- the writing of Book No. 6 (which is due to be published by Penguin in 2006).

What do travel writers take on their travels? A notebook and pen, of course.  A pocket scribble pad to jot down observations through the day. Plus a Swiss Army knife (remember to stow it in checked luggage for flights), a money belt with emergency dollars, a photocopy of passport and visas. Today I'm making final arrangements for my next trip. My ticket is booked.  I've done my background reading.  I've swapped my indulgent Trumper's shaving brush for an ancient, one-bristle affair.  I'm debating whether to take one pair of trousers or two.  What else? The secret is to take as little as possible, apart from a large sense of adventure...and a big bottle of peppermint foot lotion.

In a couple of days I'll be travelling from Istanbul to India, along the Asia Overland Trail, through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The journey will form the basis of my next book, to be published in spring 2006 (there's more to the story but I'm being cagey!).  Penguin-Viking have bought it, along with 'Falling for Icarus' (which will be in the stores in the spring). I'm tremendously excited about the move to Penguin.

My cup runneth over!  Many thanks to those of you, dear readers, who took the time to help me to come up with a title for my Crete book.  I received over 120 suggestions and at last we're there...almost!

Regular readers of the newsletter will remember the story of the new book: -

Two years ago my mother died. In the moment of her death, as I threw open her bedroom window to let her soul soar free, I wanted to fly.  To rise above my mourning.  To feel wings lift me into the warm spring sky.

The compulsion was the single clear certainty in my then dislocated life.  I grabbed hold of it.  And decided to build a feather-light flying machine, even though I have no pilot's license and had never made anything more complex than a book case.

Joy to the world! I've finished the third draft of the Crete book, the story of my building and flying an aeroplane in Greece - as a means of travelling into the ancient myths. I plan to do a couple more edits before submitting it for publication. But don't queue up outside your local bookshop yet; it won't be published until spring 2004.

I love this stage of writing, when a book has a beginning, a middle and an end (though not necessarily in that order). For me writing a first draft is always emotional and draining (as illustrated by my consumption of gallons of Greek coffee and tea and acres of chocolate biscuits). Subsequent drafts depend more on analytical thought, hence engage the heart less (and reduce my caffeine and fast-sugar needs). By this stage a writer knows his or her book and characters. It is a time for craftsmanship, for endless revision, for - as
Flaubert wrote - prose is like hair that shines with combing.

I'd promised myself that I wouldn't write this month's letter about our son. His arrival twelve weeks ago was a blessing but one that has little relevance outside our small family circle. I may have been moved by many aspects of fatherhood, especially on parental responsibility and intuiting understanding without words. But even these lessons were not reason enough for me to write to you about him.

Until I exchanged these thoughts with another new parent, and reader, in Greece. He wrote to me in response, 'Basic communication is so ancient and deep, and comes so easy that we never expect it. For millions of years, living creatures have been communicating without speech, and they still do, much better than us who have based our communication on language. Language reaches other widths and heights in detailed expression but is not for the basic. And lies are only told. They can never be expressed otherwise.'  

It's summer and I'm now ready to sit down and relax in the garden.  Or so I'd hoped...

It's been a busy spring: completing 'Building Icarus' for Radio 4, reviewing Alain de Botton's 'The Art of Travel' for the Sunday Times, tutoring at Arvon (with an extraordinary group) and launching this website, which Noble Caledonia and amazon.co.uk associates chose as their Site-of-the-Week.
 
Of course most of my time has been spent writing the Crete book.  I finished the first draft last week: 115,074 words, some of them even spelt correctly. It's a rare thrill to hold a new manuscript in ones hand, and daunting too knowing the amount of work that remains to be done.  But it should be easier from here on.  I find writing a first draft is emotional while editing is only hard, analytical graft.  Over the next months I'll work through at least five or six drafts and - all being well - deliver the book to the publisher in early 2003.  And the publication date?  Spring 2004.