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Journey Without Maps
The iconic writer's travel log from the uncharted shores of West Africa. Leaving Europe for the first time in his life, Graham Greene set out in 1935 to discover Liberia, then a virtually unmapped republic on the shores of West Africa. This captivating account of his arduous 350-mile journey on foot - a great adventure which took him from the border with Sierra Leone to the Atlantic coast at Grand Bassa - is as much a record of one young man's self-discovery as it is a striking insight into one of the few areas of Africa untouched by Western colonisation. Journey Without Maps is regarded as a masterclass in travel writing.WITH A FOREWORD BY TIM BUTCHER AND AN INTRODUCTION BY PAUL THEROUX'One of the best travel books this century' Independent
256 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1936
361 people are currently reading
3180 people want to read
About the author
Graham Greene
774 books5,987 followersHenry Graham Greene was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century.
Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. The Power and the Glory won the 1941 Hawthornden Prize and The Heart of the Matter won the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Best of the James Tait Black. Greene was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize. Several of his stories have been filmed, some more than once, and he collaborated with filmmaker Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).
He converted to Catholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife, Vivienne Dayrell-Browning. Later in life he took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic". He died in 1991, aged 86, of leukemia, and was buried in Corseaux cemetery in Switzerland. William Golding called Greene "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety".
Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. The Power and the Glory won the 1941 Hawthornden Prize and The Heart of the Matter won the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Best of the James Tait Black. Greene was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize. Several of his stories have been filmed, some more than once, and he collaborated with filmmaker Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).
He converted to Catholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife, Vivienne Dayrell-Browning. Later in life he took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic". He died in 1991, aged 86, of leukemia, and was buried in Corseaux cemetery in Switzerland. William Golding called Greene "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety".
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July 31, 2018
”The fever would not let me sleep at all, but by the early morning it was sweated out of me. My temperature was a long way below normal, but the worst boredom of the trek for the time being was over. I had made a discovery during the night which interested me. I had discovered in myself a passionate interest in living. I had always assumed before, as a matter of course, that death was desirable.
It seemed that night an important discovery. It was like a conversion, and I had never experienced a conversion before. (I had not been converted to a religious faith. I had been convinced by specific arguments in the probability of its creed.) If the experience had not been so new to me, it would have seemed less important. I should have known that conversions don’t last, or if they last at all it is only as a little sediment at the bottom of the brain. Perhaps the sediment has value, memory of the conversion may have some force in an emergency; I may be able to strengthen myself with the intellectual idea that once in Zigi’s Town I had been completely convinced of the beauty and desirability of the mere act of living.”
Graham and Barbara Greene leaving for Liberia
Graham Greene age 31 decides that he needs to go hike around in Liberia to find material for his next book. Now I’m not sure why he picks Liberia, maybe because most of it is uncharted and the maps that are available have wide chunks of Don’t Know What the Frill is in There. The explorer’s bug seem to be rooted in every Englishman’s soul and in the case of this book also in an Englishwoman’s soul as well. Graham had asked literally everyone he knows to go to Liberia with him. They all turned him down. In what seems to be a moment of mutual inebriation at a wedding he asks his first cousin Barbara Greene aged 27 to go with him.
She says yes.
The next morning they are both thinking OMG. Despite a bit of cold feet by both parties when the day comes to disembark Barbara is with him. Now unknown to Graham, and even at this point unknown to Barbara, she is going to write a book about her experiences on this trip. She keeps a diary; and methodically, even when her head is numbed with fatigue records her impressions of the day. In her book Graham is the central character, a man to be admired, a towering figure on the trail in front of her. In his book she is a shadowy figure, a mere ghost against the canvas, and referred to only occasionally as cousin and never by her name. There must have been some self-preservation raising a few flags in Graham’s mind when he decided to allow his cousin to come with him. As it turns out he becomes very sick and the young, pampered cousin steps up and does what is necessary to keep the expedition moving back towards the coast to save her cousin’s life.
A Very Earnest Looking Graham Greene
They stop off in the Canary Islands on the way to Liberia and to Graham’s mortification they are showing a film based on one of his books.
”The cinema in Tenerife was showing a film which had been adapted from one of my own novels. It had been an instructive and rather painful experience to see it shown. The direction was incompetent, the photography undistinguished, the story sentimental. If there was any truth in the original it had been carefully altered, if anything was left unchanged it was because it was untrue. By what was unchanged I could judge and condemn my own novel: I could see clearly what was cheap and banal enough to fit the cheap banal film.”
I rarely run into an author that is happy with the adaptation of his work to film. With that all said and understood there has been many a writer who has survived by the generous checks that Hollywood has sent them usually because it is an astronomically larger number than what they received off of books sales. Writers need to ignore the film, enjoy the money, and write another book. It is evident that this film was a burr under his skin because Graham brings it up again.
”To my relief, because by contract my name had to appear on every poster, it had kept to the smaller shabbier cinemas, until now it was washed up in Tenerife, in a shaded side street behind an old carved door like a monastery’s. This was what made it an agreeable acquaintance; it hadn’t the shamelessness of success; it might be vulgar, but it wasn’t successfully vulgar. There was something quite un-Hollywood in its failure.”
Graham decided to follow, roughly, the path of another English explorer and colonizer Sir Alfred Sharpe. They start in Freetown, Sierra Leone which GG has not seen the last of that place as he will find himself assigned there with British Intelligence during the war. They go up through French New Guinea and down through the heart of Liberia, back to the coast.
The Map of the Path
Their porters when asked how far the next village was always responded with...TOO FAR...TOO FAR. An endless series of elaborate negotiations with the hired help tested GG’s patience to the breaking point. He had to get increasingly clever to keep everyone motivated to keep moving down the path.
It is a brutal hike with dirty huts the best they can hope for at the end of the day. Insects are nibbling at them the whole trip. They had to keep their shoes on the whole time or a jigger bug would get under your toenail forcing a person to do a rather painful version of the jitterbug. Rats are an epidemic and despite their best efforts they invade all of their personal effects eating anything that is left out. They encounter people suffering from horrible diseases. The one most mentioned is venereal diseases. They don’t have the proper medication these people need, but they give them epsom salts and bandage their weeping sores as best they can.
There are many times when they stop for the day when they decide the only thing they can do is get drunk. Barbara probably drank more whiskey on this trip than she does for the whole rest of her life.
There are pleasant moments bordering on the erotic. Graham records a moment when they are on the train before they disappear into the wilderness.
”The train stopped at every station, and the women pressed up along the line, their great black nipples like the centre point of a target. I was not yet tired of the sight of naked bodies, or else these women were prettier and more finely-built than most of those I saw in the Republic. It was curious how quickly one abandoned the white standard. These long breasts falling in flat bronze folds soon seemed more beautiful than the small rounded immature European breasts.”
They get plastered with a King who is surrounded by the tangled half naked bodies of his numerous wives and even more numerous daughters. This is one time when I felt that Barbara out wrote Graham. Her recording of the event is sizzling and I included it in my review of her book. Things get rather odd as the palm wine and the whiskey make the rounds.
Palm Wine with a Whiskey chaser
”The favourite daughter could speak a few words of English: her thigh under the tight cloth about her waist was like the soft furry rump of a kitten; she had lovely breasts: she was quite clean, much cleaner than we were. The chief wanted us to stay the night, and I began to wonder how far his hospitality might go.”
A little wishful thinking on GG’s part, but the King was quite taken with his cousin. A bit of bartering might have made for an interesting night for all parties.
Liberia was established by the United States as a colony for former African-American slaves. What I didn’t know was that Sierra Leone, the neighboring country, was also a colony for free blacks by the English Empire. Like most third world countries corruption is rampant. The former leader of Liberia had just been ousted prior to the Greene Expedition for selling his own people into slavery. GG sums up the situation.
”They wore uniforms, occupied official positions, went to parties at Government House, had the vote, but they knew all the time they were funny )oh, the peals of laughter!), funny to the heartless prefect eye of the white man. If they had been slaves they would have had more dignity; there is no shame in being ruled by a stranger, but these men had been given their tin shacks, their cathedral, their votes, and city councils, their shadow of self-government; they were expected to play the part like white men and the more they copied white men, the more funny it was to to the prefects. They were withered by laughter; the more desperately they tried to regain their dignity the funnier they became.”
The First Edition
What a wonderful opportunity for me to read two different accounts of the same trip. Barbara’s book (Too Late to Turn Back) stays more with surface observations, but still she exhibits remarkable astuteness at times. GG’s book is bulked up with history, memories from other events in his life, and more philosophical observations of his state of mind. I was a little disappointed that GG does not give Barbara credit for her courage in stepping up when he becomes too sick to function. Maybe he felt it would be a distraction from his conception of the book or maybe he didn’t want to be seen as having a moment of weakness. He does mention he was sick in his book, but certainly does not let on just how sick he was. When he slipped into a coma Barbara was making funeral plans in her head. I would suggest that if anyone is interested in reading both books to read Barbara’s book first. I was much more hyper aware reading GG’s book of any brief allusion to this shadowy cousin. It was as if I’d already taken the trip myself with GG and; therefore, was able to enjoy events as he relates them as if I had shared the experience.
My Too Late To Turn Back by Barbara Greene Review
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
It seemed that night an important discovery. It was like a conversion, and I had never experienced a conversion before. (I had not been converted to a religious faith. I had been convinced by specific arguments in the probability of its creed.) If the experience had not been so new to me, it would have seemed less important. I should have known that conversions don’t last, or if they last at all it is only as a little sediment at the bottom of the brain. Perhaps the sediment has value, memory of the conversion may have some force in an emergency; I may be able to strengthen myself with the intellectual idea that once in Zigi’s Town I had been completely convinced of the beauty and desirability of the mere act of living.”
Graham and Barbara Greene leaving for Liberia
Graham Greene age 31 decides that he needs to go hike around in Liberia to find material for his next book. Now I’m not sure why he picks Liberia, maybe because most of it is uncharted and the maps that are available have wide chunks of Don’t Know What the Frill is in There. The explorer’s bug seem to be rooted in every Englishman’s soul and in the case of this book also in an Englishwoman’s soul as well. Graham had asked literally everyone he knows to go to Liberia with him. They all turned him down. In what seems to be a moment of mutual inebriation at a wedding he asks his first cousin Barbara Greene aged 27 to go with him.
She says yes.
The next morning they are both thinking OMG. Despite a bit of cold feet by both parties when the day comes to disembark Barbara is with him. Now unknown to Graham, and even at this point unknown to Barbara, she is going to write a book about her experiences on this trip. She keeps a diary; and methodically, even when her head is numbed with fatigue records her impressions of the day. In her book Graham is the central character, a man to be admired, a towering figure on the trail in front of her. In his book she is a shadowy figure, a mere ghost against the canvas, and referred to only occasionally as cousin and never by her name. There must have been some self-preservation raising a few flags in Graham’s mind when he decided to allow his cousin to come with him. As it turns out he becomes very sick and the young, pampered cousin steps up and does what is necessary to keep the expedition moving back towards the coast to save her cousin’s life.
A Very Earnest Looking Graham Greene
They stop off in the Canary Islands on the way to Liberia and to Graham’s mortification they are showing a film based on one of his books.
”The cinema in Tenerife was showing a film which had been adapted from one of my own novels. It had been an instructive and rather painful experience to see it shown. The direction was incompetent, the photography undistinguished, the story sentimental. If there was any truth in the original it had been carefully altered, if anything was left unchanged it was because it was untrue. By what was unchanged I could judge and condemn my own novel: I could see clearly what was cheap and banal enough to fit the cheap banal film.”
I rarely run into an author that is happy with the adaptation of his work to film. With that all said and understood there has been many a writer who has survived by the generous checks that Hollywood has sent them usually because it is an astronomically larger number than what they received off of books sales. Writers need to ignore the film, enjoy the money, and write another book. It is evident that this film was a burr under his skin because Graham brings it up again.
”To my relief, because by contract my name had to appear on every poster, it had kept to the smaller shabbier cinemas, until now it was washed up in Tenerife, in a shaded side street behind an old carved door like a monastery’s. This was what made it an agreeable acquaintance; it hadn’t the shamelessness of success; it might be vulgar, but it wasn’t successfully vulgar. There was something quite un-Hollywood in its failure.”
Graham decided to follow, roughly, the path of another English explorer and colonizer Sir Alfred Sharpe. They start in Freetown, Sierra Leone which GG has not seen the last of that place as he will find himself assigned there with British Intelligence during the war. They go up through French New Guinea and down through the heart of Liberia, back to the coast.
The Map of the Path
Their porters when asked how far the next village was always responded with...TOO FAR...TOO FAR. An endless series of elaborate negotiations with the hired help tested GG’s patience to the breaking point. He had to get increasingly clever to keep everyone motivated to keep moving down the path.
It is a brutal hike with dirty huts the best they can hope for at the end of the day. Insects are nibbling at them the whole trip. They had to keep their shoes on the whole time or a jigger bug would get under your toenail forcing a person to do a rather painful version of the jitterbug. Rats are an epidemic and despite their best efforts they invade all of their personal effects eating anything that is left out. They encounter people suffering from horrible diseases. The one most mentioned is venereal diseases. They don’t have the proper medication these people need, but they give them epsom salts and bandage their weeping sores as best they can.
There are many times when they stop for the day when they decide the only thing they can do is get drunk. Barbara probably drank more whiskey on this trip than she does for the whole rest of her life.
There are pleasant moments bordering on the erotic. Graham records a moment when they are on the train before they disappear into the wilderness.
”The train stopped at every station, and the women pressed up along the line, their great black nipples like the centre point of a target. I was not yet tired of the sight of naked bodies, or else these women were prettier and more finely-built than most of those I saw in the Republic. It was curious how quickly one abandoned the white standard. These long breasts falling in flat bronze folds soon seemed more beautiful than the small rounded immature European breasts.”
They get plastered with a King who is surrounded by the tangled half naked bodies of his numerous wives and even more numerous daughters. This is one time when I felt that Barbara out wrote Graham. Her recording of the event is sizzling and I included it in my review of her book. Things get rather odd as the palm wine and the whiskey make the rounds.
Palm Wine with a Whiskey chaser
”The favourite daughter could speak a few words of English: her thigh under the tight cloth about her waist was like the soft furry rump of a kitten; she had lovely breasts: she was quite clean, much cleaner than we were. The chief wanted us to stay the night, and I began to wonder how far his hospitality might go.”
A little wishful thinking on GG’s part, but the King was quite taken with his cousin. A bit of bartering might have made for an interesting night for all parties.
Liberia was established by the United States as a colony for former African-American slaves. What I didn’t know was that Sierra Leone, the neighboring country, was also a colony for free blacks by the English Empire. Like most third world countries corruption is rampant. The former leader of Liberia had just been ousted prior to the Greene Expedition for selling his own people into slavery. GG sums up the situation.
”They wore uniforms, occupied official positions, went to parties at Government House, had the vote, but they knew all the time they were funny )oh, the peals of laughter!), funny to the heartless prefect eye of the white man. If they had been slaves they would have had more dignity; there is no shame in being ruled by a stranger, but these men had been given their tin shacks, their cathedral, their votes, and city councils, their shadow of self-government; they were expected to play the part like white men and the more they copied white men, the more funny it was to to the prefects. They were withered by laughter; the more desperately they tried to regain their dignity the funnier they became.”
The First Edition
What a wonderful opportunity for me to read two different accounts of the same trip. Barbara’s book (Too Late to Turn Back) stays more with surface observations, but still she exhibits remarkable astuteness at times. GG’s book is bulked up with history, memories from other events in his life, and more philosophical observations of his state of mind. I was a little disappointed that GG does not give Barbara credit for her courage in stepping up when he becomes too sick to function. Maybe he felt it would be a distraction from his conception of the book or maybe he didn’t want to be seen as having a moment of weakness. He does mention he was sick in his book, but certainly does not let on just how sick he was. When he slipped into a coma Barbara was making funeral plans in her head. I would suggest that if anyone is interested in reading both books to read Barbara’s book first. I was much more hyper aware reading GG’s book of any brief allusion to this shadowy cousin. It was as if I’d already taken the trip myself with GG and; therefore, was able to enjoy events as he relates them as if I had shared the experience.
My Too Late To Turn Back by Barbara Greene Review
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
February 15, 2023
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
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
September 30, 2024
“The motive of a journey deserves a little attention. It is not the fully conscious mind which chooses West Africa. There are times when one is willing to suffer discomfort for the chance of finding the 'heart of darkness' based on not only one's present but of the past from which one has emerged. To me Africa has always seemed an important image. It’s not any part of Africa which has acted so strongly on the unconscious mind; certainly no part where the white settler has been most successful in reproducing the conditions of his home country. A quality of darkness is needed, of the inexplicable. Today our world seems peculiarly susceptible to brutality when one sees to what peril of extinction that the centuries of cerebration have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover from where we have come, to recall at which point we went astray.”
“The men had been educated to understand how they had been swindled, how they had been given the worst of two worlds, and they had enough power to express themselves in a soured officious way; they had died, inside their European clothes. They wore uniforms, occupied official positions, had the vote, but they knew all the time they were funny (oh, those peals of laughter!), funny to the heartless prefect eye of the white man. If they had been slaves they would have had more dignity, since there is no shame in being ruled by a stranger. They were expected to play the part like white men and the more they copied white men, the more funny it was to the prefects. They were withered by laughter; the more desperately they tried to regain their dignity the funnier they became.”
“I never wearied of the villages in which I spent the night: the sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits. Love was an arm round the neck, wealth a little pile of palm nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature. And these were the people I had been told couldn't trusted. It was no good protesting later that one had not come across a single example of dishonesty from the natives in the interior: only gentleness, kindness, an honesty which one dared not to assume in Europe.”
- Graham Greene, 1936
************
During one of his manic episodes Graham Greene decided to leave merry old England for a sojourn in Africa; not just any part of Africa but the wildest unmapped region now known as Liberia, where the explorers had penetrated only a few miles inland. Kenya or South Africa wouldn’t do, he had to reach his own personal heart of darkness. Equipped with provisions requiring thirty native carriers to transport: beds, chairs, tables, tents and cases of the most critical ingredient whiskey, with his cousin Barbara in tow, he left Liverpool and sailed south to Tenerife, a resort island off the coast of Spain, to Dakar in Senegal, happy port where locals lounged in the sun, landing in Freeport, Sierra Leone, a British colony of English manners.
Crossing the border without the proper papers, Greene and entourage began a 350 mile month long trek through the backcountry bush. On the way he encountered indigenous peoples, devil dancers, selfless missionaries, yellow fever, malaria, dysentery and venereal disease, staying in huts rife with rats, cockroaches the size of crayfish and run of the mill mosquitoes. Along narrow trails through the forest and furnace a depressive phase set in, where folly turns to regret and recrimination, and as the whiskey ran out was replaced with ennui and desperation. Literally on last legs he begins to see shacks of wood and tin, markets and men in clothes, women with shirts and skirts, cold beer and iced gin, in short civilization.
Greene was 30 years old in 1935 when he traveled to Africa with a cousin who isn’t written much about and published her own account. He is critical of the colonial commissioners and favorable towards the natives and missionaries. It was the first time he traveled outside of Europe, and to one of the most difficult regions of Africa. He would later describe it as “foolhardy…absurd and reckless”. The journey is at times interrupted by flashback scenes from England and Europe that seem to have little connection to the story. Beyond these distractions there is an undeniable sense of self discovery. It’s curious how V S Naipaul patterned himself after Greene, as a traveling critic of empire and a novelist of the world, without giving due credit.
************
“I never thought much of Greene. His novels have rather faded, haven’t they? I am not an admirer.” - V S Naipaul
“The men had been educated to understand how they had been swindled, how they had been given the worst of two worlds, and they had enough power to express themselves in a soured officious way; they had died, inside their European clothes. They wore uniforms, occupied official positions, had the vote, but they knew all the time they were funny (oh, those peals of laughter!), funny to the heartless prefect eye of the white man. If they had been slaves they would have had more dignity, since there is no shame in being ruled by a stranger. They were expected to play the part like white men and the more they copied white men, the more funny it was to the prefects. They were withered by laughter; the more desperately they tried to regain their dignity the funnier they became.”
“I never wearied of the villages in which I spent the night: the sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits. Love was an arm round the neck, wealth a little pile of palm nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature. And these were the people I had been told couldn't trusted. It was no good protesting later that one had not come across a single example of dishonesty from the natives in the interior: only gentleness, kindness, an honesty which one dared not to assume in Europe.”
- Graham Greene, 1936
************
During one of his manic episodes Graham Greene decided to leave merry old England for a sojourn in Africa; not just any part of Africa but the wildest unmapped region now known as Liberia, where the explorers had penetrated only a few miles inland. Kenya or South Africa wouldn’t do, he had to reach his own personal heart of darkness. Equipped with provisions requiring thirty native carriers to transport: beds, chairs, tables, tents and cases of the most critical ingredient whiskey, with his cousin Barbara in tow, he left Liverpool and sailed south to Tenerife, a resort island off the coast of Spain, to Dakar in Senegal, happy port where locals lounged in the sun, landing in Freeport, Sierra Leone, a British colony of English manners.
Crossing the border without the proper papers, Greene and entourage began a 350 mile month long trek through the backcountry bush. On the way he encountered indigenous peoples, devil dancers, selfless missionaries, yellow fever, malaria, dysentery and venereal disease, staying in huts rife with rats, cockroaches the size of crayfish and run of the mill mosquitoes. Along narrow trails through the forest and furnace a depressive phase set in, where folly turns to regret and recrimination, and as the whiskey ran out was replaced with ennui and desperation. Literally on last legs he begins to see shacks of wood and tin, markets and men in clothes, women with shirts and skirts, cold beer and iced gin, in short civilization.
Greene was 30 years old in 1935 when he traveled to Africa with a cousin who isn’t written much about and published her own account. He is critical of the colonial commissioners and favorable towards the natives and missionaries. It was the first time he traveled outside of Europe, and to one of the most difficult regions of Africa. He would later describe it as “foolhardy…absurd and reckless”. The journey is at times interrupted by flashback scenes from England and Europe that seem to have little connection to the story. Beyond these distractions there is an undeniable sense of self discovery. It’s curious how V S Naipaul patterned himself after Greene, as a traveling critic of empire and a novelist of the world, without giving due credit.
************
“I never thought much of Greene. His novels have rather faded, haven’t they? I am not an admirer.” - V S Naipaul
September 29, 2024
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.
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.
February 12, 2023
Greene with his cousin Barbara spent a month in 1935 traveling through Sierra Leone, French Guinea and Liberia. Over a month they traveled 350 miles through uncharted in many places jungle. This was his first trip outside Europe and what an adventure. He had 25 porters and lots and lots of whisky.
Liberia one of then only two African countries governed by Africans. Towards the end of the book there is a bit about Firestone and how they got a million acre 100 year lease for a rubber plantation and how Greene saw how this would keep the country impoverished.
The writing is fascinating from the different people he met such as missionaries, politicians, soldiers, tribal chiefs. As well as the simplicity of his porters and their joy of a full moon.
The poverty, corruption and racism is described by Greene throughout. His exhaustion, frustration, joy, insights and you can see where he gets his characters and descriptions for future based African novels. This journey shaped his career as an author.
It is odd that he hardly ever mentions his travel companion Barbara. She also wrote a book of the journey which I hope to read one day aptly called ‘To late to turn back’.
A great read.
Liberia one of then only two African countries governed by Africans. Towards the end of the book there is a bit about Firestone and how they got a million acre 100 year lease for a rubber plantation and how Greene saw how this would keep the country impoverished.
The writing is fascinating from the different people he met such as missionaries, politicians, soldiers, tribal chiefs. As well as the simplicity of his porters and their joy of a full moon.
The poverty, corruption and racism is described by Greene throughout. His exhaustion, frustration, joy, insights and you can see where he gets his characters and descriptions for future based African novels. This journey shaped his career as an author.
It is odd that he hardly ever mentions his travel companion Barbara. She also wrote a book of the journey which I hope to read one day aptly called ‘To late to turn back’.
A great read.
December 4, 2019
My favorite Uncle Graham went travelling.
It was his first trip outside Europe at the age of 30 - and this trip would shape his future career in many ways.
I like Graham Greene and I like Africa, so when I´m administering only 3 stars it is mainly because this diary-like novel doesn´t really feel coherent.
Surely I admire a man who throw himself into the abyss well knowing it may go wrong, but even Graham Greene mentions Mungo Park as an inspiration, Mungo Park did a much better job at telling his story.
Apart from this slightly critic view at the handcraft, there are interesting observations about Liberia a few years before WW2.
The political climate in West Africa has regrettably only changed a little.
Also, as GG allegedly returned to Sierra Leone during WW2 in spite of the hardships he encountered in neighboring Liberia is an interesting twist - not to mention his later travels to the Congo Basin.
This edition has foreword and introduction by two hardcore travelers, Paul Theroux and Tim Butcher and even these two texts combined are almost as long as GG´s travel tale it is well worth reading.
It was his first trip outside Europe at the age of 30 - and this trip would shape his future career in many ways.
I like Graham Greene and I like Africa, so when I´m administering only 3 stars it is mainly because this diary-like novel doesn´t really feel coherent.
Surely I admire a man who throw himself into the abyss well knowing it may go wrong, but even Graham Greene mentions Mungo Park as an inspiration, Mungo Park did a much better job at telling his story.
Apart from this slightly critic view at the handcraft, there are interesting observations about Liberia a few years before WW2.
The political climate in West Africa has regrettably only changed a little.
Also, as GG allegedly returned to Sierra Leone during WW2 in spite of the hardships he encountered in neighboring Liberia is an interesting twist - not to mention his later travels to the Congo Basin.
This edition has foreword and introduction by two hardcore travelers, Paul Theroux and Tim Butcher and even these two texts combined are almost as long as GG´s travel tale it is well worth reading.
May 15, 2021
In 1935, Graham Greene took a literary risk that most writers, less than half a dozen novels old and still far from their breakthrough, would not even dream of taking. He embarked on his first ever tour outside the frontiers of Europe and that too to a far-flung country by the name of Liberia which most travel writers back then in the days before Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux would not even dream of exploring, let alone deconstructing it with the incisive depth of a journalist and portraying it with the searing honesty and even stark poetry of a great storyteller. The result was "Journey Without Maps" which, true to what we already know of Greene's ability to subvert, is less of a typical travelogue or even a travel diary, despite what some reviews here seem to suggest. Rather, it is a typically compelling narrative of a white man with both a roving eye and an astute perspective journeying across the breadth of a nation with a strange parentage and ancestry in his quest to discover, to probe into the mythical allure of this continent named Africa.
What compelled him to go ahead with this seemingly foolhardy quest in the first place? There were, as you must have guessed from the title, no reliable maps to know the exact directions of how to reach a place from another; there was preciously little written and chronicled about the country, its political scenario and even what it held for a travelling Englishman as Greene or even his cousin Barbara who accompanied him in this strange, seemingly aimless journey. And on top of that, hostility could be expected too; no white man had ever been in the depths of this country as it had been founded originally as a bastion of defiant freedom from the slave trade of America. What was Greene doing there? What did he aim to find, discover or unearth?
In his own words, he sought the source or the genesis of a new recourse to a primitive form of instinctive behaviour that he had been observing around him in the West and more precisely in a fast-changing England of the twentieth century. Africa had been chronicled and described in both its exotic glory and its imperialist grime even before, by the likes of Haggard and Conrad, two storytellers whose conflicting styles had inspired Greene's writing itself and it is to deconstruct both these facets that also serves, in a sense, Greene's real purpose, something subversive and radical for a mere chronicler that itself distinguishes this work as not merely unique but also essential reading for all.
But if that makes you think that "Journey Without Maps" is a weighty tome of a book, rest assured that this is far from a didactic or even exhausting book. Even as early as 1935, a time when Greene was still a book or two from cementing his fame as a storyteller who could blend moral complexity and philosophical seriousness with compelling storytelling, this is another testament to his always assured gift of writing and portraying experience, thought, action and after-thought with an elegant, crisp yet vivid and even poetic prose style that feels not only effortless but also enjoyable and enlightening to read. There are also some reviews here on Goodreads that have described this book as a "slog" - if readers are expecting that this is a travel book in the present-day sense, meant to evoke pleasing sights and sounds and smells in the fashion of a documentary, let me remind you that Greene is not interested in the aesthetic whitewashing of unvarnished, even unsavoury realities. We are always aware of the alienating barrenness of this uncharted country; we are always aware of the arduous difficulties of the trek with the faithful but even gently quarrelsome carriers, the meagre and even mediocre nature of the hospitality to be found in the numerous small villages to be found in between, the open hostility of the nature of this landscape - from the commonplace rats and cockroaches to the inexorable jiggers and other pests and creatures and even the general air of desolate despair and pathos in this bleak country. And yet, what is wondrous is how Greene records each and every unsavoury experience with gritty honesty, witty self-deprecation and even a loose sense of delirious joy and relief of being deprived of all material comforts and losing himself to the languid atmosphere of not only Liberia but also the core of Africa that it represents.
And that also does not mean that this is a book bereft of wonder. There is the warm, affectionate camaraderie with the native carriers, whom Greene describes as hard-working, dedicated men all too believable rather than just as cultural stereotypes; there is the first heady taste of the approach of the African continent, the first sight of the physical sexuality of the women and of the raw, feral charisma of the men, all described with an almost erotic, mesmerising intensity that the writer had brought and would bring again in his other writings and novels as well. Greene creates vivid, even haunting and indelible scenes for us to remember and scenes that resonate in the reader's mind long after finishing the book - the snail-like marks of sweat on the twitching bodies of the hammock carriers, the delirious exhilaration of the tribal dances, the strange, spell-binding hypnotism of the masked dancers, the terror and the mystery of the bush societies and the devils strutting across the breadth of the country, the relentless rats scampering down walls, the fear of a devil holding an entire village in the spell of paranoia and suspense, the carriers breaking into song on their march, the chiefs dashing eggs and swilling whiskey and even a sacred waterfall being the site of a mythical sacrifice.
And in between, in an ingenious, radical stroke, he also takes bold, beautifully written detours - the seediness of the suburbia of London, the grit and grime of Nottingham, the alienness of Eastern Europe, the atmosphere of violence and anarchy in Paris. And through all these, he reminds us of what he is driving here at - not merely a travel diary of a trek through a country, the first of the many turbulent, far-flung places that would attract his interest and attention, but most crucially a politically astute and psychologically resonant portrait of a culture of civilisation trying to reconcile itself with its primitive, base roots. Indeed, this is an unforgettable journey without the usual maps, a journey unprecedented in its intensity and its haunting portrait of the heart of darkness to be found, not in a continent, but in the heart of humanity itself.
What compelled him to go ahead with this seemingly foolhardy quest in the first place? There were, as you must have guessed from the title, no reliable maps to know the exact directions of how to reach a place from another; there was preciously little written and chronicled about the country, its political scenario and even what it held for a travelling Englishman as Greene or even his cousin Barbara who accompanied him in this strange, seemingly aimless journey. And on top of that, hostility could be expected too; no white man had ever been in the depths of this country as it had been founded originally as a bastion of defiant freedom from the slave trade of America. What was Greene doing there? What did he aim to find, discover or unearth?
In his own words, he sought the source or the genesis of a new recourse to a primitive form of instinctive behaviour that he had been observing around him in the West and more precisely in a fast-changing England of the twentieth century. Africa had been chronicled and described in both its exotic glory and its imperialist grime even before, by the likes of Haggard and Conrad, two storytellers whose conflicting styles had inspired Greene's writing itself and it is to deconstruct both these facets that also serves, in a sense, Greene's real purpose, something subversive and radical for a mere chronicler that itself distinguishes this work as not merely unique but also essential reading for all.
But if that makes you think that "Journey Without Maps" is a weighty tome of a book, rest assured that this is far from a didactic or even exhausting book. Even as early as 1935, a time when Greene was still a book or two from cementing his fame as a storyteller who could blend moral complexity and philosophical seriousness with compelling storytelling, this is another testament to his always assured gift of writing and portraying experience, thought, action and after-thought with an elegant, crisp yet vivid and even poetic prose style that feels not only effortless but also enjoyable and enlightening to read. There are also some reviews here on Goodreads that have described this book as a "slog" - if readers are expecting that this is a travel book in the present-day sense, meant to evoke pleasing sights and sounds and smells in the fashion of a documentary, let me remind you that Greene is not interested in the aesthetic whitewashing of unvarnished, even unsavoury realities. We are always aware of the alienating barrenness of this uncharted country; we are always aware of the arduous difficulties of the trek with the faithful but even gently quarrelsome carriers, the meagre and even mediocre nature of the hospitality to be found in the numerous small villages to be found in between, the open hostility of the nature of this landscape - from the commonplace rats and cockroaches to the inexorable jiggers and other pests and creatures and even the general air of desolate despair and pathos in this bleak country. And yet, what is wondrous is how Greene records each and every unsavoury experience with gritty honesty, witty self-deprecation and even a loose sense of delirious joy and relief of being deprived of all material comforts and losing himself to the languid atmosphere of not only Liberia but also the core of Africa that it represents.
And that also does not mean that this is a book bereft of wonder. There is the warm, affectionate camaraderie with the native carriers, whom Greene describes as hard-working, dedicated men all too believable rather than just as cultural stereotypes; there is the first heady taste of the approach of the African continent, the first sight of the physical sexuality of the women and of the raw, feral charisma of the men, all described with an almost erotic, mesmerising intensity that the writer had brought and would bring again in his other writings and novels as well. Greene creates vivid, even haunting and indelible scenes for us to remember and scenes that resonate in the reader's mind long after finishing the book - the snail-like marks of sweat on the twitching bodies of the hammock carriers, the delirious exhilaration of the tribal dances, the strange, spell-binding hypnotism of the masked dancers, the terror and the mystery of the bush societies and the devils strutting across the breadth of the country, the relentless rats scampering down walls, the fear of a devil holding an entire village in the spell of paranoia and suspense, the carriers breaking into song on their march, the chiefs dashing eggs and swilling whiskey and even a sacred waterfall being the site of a mythical sacrifice.
And in between, in an ingenious, radical stroke, he also takes bold, beautifully written detours - the seediness of the suburbia of London, the grit and grime of Nottingham, the alienness of Eastern Europe, the atmosphere of violence and anarchy in Paris. And through all these, he reminds us of what he is driving here at - not merely a travel diary of a trek through a country, the first of the many turbulent, far-flung places that would attract his interest and attention, but most crucially a politically astute and psychologically resonant portrait of a culture of civilisation trying to reconcile itself with its primitive, base roots. Indeed, this is an unforgettable journey without the usual maps, a journey unprecedented in its intensity and its haunting portrait of the heart of darkness to be found, not in a continent, but in the heart of humanity itself.
July 11, 2016
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!
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!
September 18, 2016
This is slight Greene, but even slight Greene has its rewards. There is crisp lovely evocative wrting, there are some interesting memory passages, and the descriptions of what he sees are fascinating. On the other hand, his take on race is very much from the 1930s: Greene's admiration for the noble savage may seem trite and/or offensive, as is his willingness to exploit native labor, but he also recognizes the degrading nature of colonialism and the brutalities of economic exploitation. So while we might wish some passages away, that's really hindsight talking.
The main problem with this book is that Greene is too sick and weary through much of it to really engage, mentally or emotionally, with his surroundings or his writing. So the book has a slogging sameness which, while it may faithfully reproduce his experience of his trek, doesn't make for the greatest literary experience.
Finally, the introduction by Paul Theroux is execreble. Theroux repeatedly asserts that Liberia couldn't have been as "wild" as Greene depicted it, but offers no evidence for his theory -- only surmises that are contradicted by the few facts he asserts. (At one point, Theroux says that people in the interior of Liberia must have been used to white faces because of the presence of Firestone Rubber in the country -- but Greene explicitly states that the Firestone presence was limited to a specific area on the coast!). Theroux's main point is that Greene was a "dilettante" and a "lucky" traveler, a point Theroux has made in other Greene introductions as well. What we are meant to take away from the introduction (since Greene would count as a pretty hardcore traveler in most of our books) is the unstated but loudly proclaimed "I Theroux am a REAL traveler and qualified to judge who is lucky and who is REAL".
Talk about the Anxiety of Influence! No one cares, Paul. You are a facile, annoying writer who will never be a tenth of what Greene was. You walk in his footsteps and no amount of latter-day introduction dissing will change that!
The main problem with this book is that Greene is too sick and weary through much of it to really engage, mentally or emotionally, with his surroundings or his writing. So the book has a slogging sameness which, while it may faithfully reproduce his experience of his trek, doesn't make for the greatest literary experience.
Finally, the introduction by Paul Theroux is execreble. Theroux repeatedly asserts that Liberia couldn't have been as "wild" as Greene depicted it, but offers no evidence for his theory -- only surmises that are contradicted by the few facts he asserts. (At one point, Theroux says that people in the interior of Liberia must have been used to white faces because of the presence of Firestone Rubber in the country -- but Greene explicitly states that the Firestone presence was limited to a specific area on the coast!). Theroux's main point is that Greene was a "dilettante" and a "lucky" traveler, a point Theroux has made in other Greene introductions as well. What we are meant to take away from the introduction (since Greene would count as a pretty hardcore traveler in most of our books) is the unstated but loudly proclaimed "I Theroux am a REAL traveler and qualified to judge who is lucky and who is REAL".
Talk about the Anxiety of Influence! No one cares, Paul. You are a facile, annoying writer who will never be a tenth of what Greene was. You walk in his footsteps and no amount of latter-day introduction dissing will change that!
March 27, 2023
Non-fiction about Graham Greene’s travel through Liberia and Sierra Leone in 1935. It took four weeks and included walking for 350-miles at a time when a map of these countries did not exist. He and a team of hired locals from various tribes trekked through forest paths and slept in a series of isolated villages. He was occasionally carried in a hammock but preferred to walk as much as his health allowed.
I read this book to find out what western Africa was like back then. This goal was only partially achieved, as its perspective is that of a British man of his era. While he comes across as more open-minded than many, it is still filled with anachronistic and condescending views regarding the people of Africa. It seems to alternate between ideas that would have been more compatible with 19th century colonial imperialism and those that reflect the difficult times of the 1930s.
It includes descriptions of diseases, insects, rats, weather, and other discomforts that made traveling through these remote areas so difficult. Apparently, drinking was required – lots of drinking. We meet a number of interesting local villagers, as well as an eccentric group of Europeans who have decided to abandon their previous lives. It is difficult to say I enjoyed this book. Greene’s outdated attitudes are almost painful to a modern reader. However, I did find it worthwhile from a historical perspective. As I read, I noticed that Greene was willing to reflect on his own prejudices and, through living and working together, finds a new appreciation for the African people.
I read this book to find out what western Africa was like back then. This goal was only partially achieved, as its perspective is that of a British man of his era. While he comes across as more open-minded than many, it is still filled with anachronistic and condescending views regarding the people of Africa. It seems to alternate between ideas that would have been more compatible with 19th century colonial imperialism and those that reflect the difficult times of the 1930s.
It includes descriptions of diseases, insects, rats, weather, and other discomforts that made traveling through these remote areas so difficult. Apparently, drinking was required – lots of drinking. We meet a number of interesting local villagers, as well as an eccentric group of Europeans who have decided to abandon their previous lives. It is difficult to say I enjoyed this book. Greene’s outdated attitudes are almost painful to a modern reader. However, I did find it worthwhile from a historical perspective. As I read, I noticed that Greene was willing to reflect on his own prejudices and, through living and working together, finds a new appreciation for the African people.
April 17, 2010
This travel book, published in 1936, is the account of a journey the author and his female cousin took on foot (more or less) across Liberia. At the time, the only British map of Liberia had a large, empty, white space on it, and the only U.S. map had the same white space with the word "Cannibals" written on it. Hence, the title.
It is less impressive when you learn that Greene hired 25 native "carriers" to accompany them. They not only carried the stuff, they carried his cousin, and, on a few occasions, Greene.
Greene and a couple of the carriers seemingly always got far ahead of the rest of the group, and he apparently gave his cousin only a vague idea of where they were going. At one point, they nearly went different directions, and they likely wouldn't have gotten together again until they reached the coast. This does not seem very chivalrous.
Was the journey itself a good idea? It sure doesn't sound like loads of fun:
"This, as I grew more tired and my health a little failed, seemed to be what I would chiefly remember as Africa: cockroaches eating our clothes, rats on the floor, dust in the throat, jiggers under the nails, ants fastening on the flesh."
To me, this book seemed disorganized and hard to follow. It might have made more sense to a British audience in the 1930s.
But I did like Greene's defense of missionaries, which I think holds true even more today than it did then:
"A great deal of nonsense has been written about missionaries. When they have not been described as the servants of imperialists or commercial exploiters, they have been regarded as sexually abnormal types who are trying to convert a simple happy pagan people to a European religion and stunt them with European repressions. It seems to be forgotten that Christianity is an Eastern religion to which Western pagans have been quite successfully converted. Missionaries are not even given credit for logic, for if one believes in Christianity at all, one must believe in its universal validity. A Christian cannot believe in one God for Europe and another God for Africa; the importance of Semitic religion was that it did not recognize one God for the East and another for the West."
It is less impressive when you learn that Greene hired 25 native "carriers" to accompany them. They not only carried the stuff, they carried his cousin, and, on a few occasions, Greene.
Greene and a couple of the carriers seemingly always got far ahead of the rest of the group, and he apparently gave his cousin only a vague idea of where they were going. At one point, they nearly went different directions, and they likely wouldn't have gotten together again until they reached the coast. This does not seem very chivalrous.
Was the journey itself a good idea? It sure doesn't sound like loads of fun:
"This, as I grew more tired and my health a little failed, seemed to be what I would chiefly remember as Africa: cockroaches eating our clothes, rats on the floor, dust in the throat, jiggers under the nails, ants fastening on the flesh."
To me, this book seemed disorganized and hard to follow. It might have made more sense to a British audience in the 1930s.
But I did like Greene's defense of missionaries, which I think holds true even more today than it did then:
"A great deal of nonsense has been written about missionaries. When they have not been described as the servants of imperialists or commercial exploiters, they have been regarded as sexually abnormal types who are trying to convert a simple happy pagan people to a European religion and stunt them with European repressions. It seems to be forgotten that Christianity is an Eastern religion to which Western pagans have been quite successfully converted. Missionaries are not even given credit for logic, for if one believes in Christianity at all, one must believe in its universal validity. A Christian cannot believe in one God for Europe and another God for Africa; the importance of Semitic religion was that it did not recognize one God for the East and another for the West."
May 18, 2011
What I like best about Graham Green is his travel books and this one doesn't disappoint. His rebellious spirit brought him to Sierra Leone back in the mid 1930's. The epitome of the English traveller hiking through deep jungles recalls the century before but with more angst, as well as his English wit which keeps the novel going.
October 30, 2014
Journey Without Maps
I’ve been reading some of the comments on Amazon and Goodreads on Graham Greene’s book before writing this. I’ve read most of Greene’s work, some many times, but not this until just now, and I was interested in what others thought of it. I don’t seem to see it the same way. You can investigate those other opinions for yourself, but here’s a little of my take.
It goes back to Norman Sherry’s fabled three volume biography. In the introduction to Volume Two he writes: ‘In life he was not willing to allow full entrance even to those familiar with his secret life. ‘ (Two ‘life’s’ there: tut tut Sherry) He goes on to state at greater length what is generally accepted as true about Greene’s character: that he put lots of time and energy into concealing himself from all those around him, that he kept secrets privately and professionally, that for example he kept two diaries, that you could hardly ever believe his stated motivation for anything. Sherry follows this description of Greene’s deceptive nature by trotting out that old canard again about him playing Russian roulette six times in five months. His source for this? Greene told him.
There is a great element of this in Journey Without Maps. I suppose that is my main thought about it: that it is a demonstration of both Greene’s wonderful ability with language, and of the untrustworthy nature of his texts. For one thing it was not without maps, and not the map he described as having written across the territory in which he proposed to walk the word ‘Cannibals’.
I don’t know if it’s possible to learn why Greene went outside Europe for the first time and set himself this dirty, dangerous task of walking across Liberia for hundreds of miles, taking his debutante cousin with him, but I do know the narrative consists of some facts mixed with one dodgy bit of information after another. Even the cousin’s age is stated wrongly in newspaper reports of the time, this information presumably given by themselves: she was twenty-eight and not twenty-three.
There is a school of thought on this that Journey Without Maps is a glimpse into a world long gone, and a glimpse into a way of approaching this world, that of the middle-class son of the British Empire venturing abroad in those quieter years before the outbreak of WWII. And of course the other take on it: that it is a journey into the psyche of the participants, or of Greene anyway, for again an untruth, he writes as if he was alone and not accompanied by a cousin who is handling the stresses better than he is.
If it amounts to anything I think it is wonderful writing. We are in some wet, hot , muddy, insect-laden jungle one moment, and back in the Cotswold village were he has left his (unmentioned) wife and months-old child the next, and he makes it all flow and work and resonate and enthral us. Or me anyway. Jesus, could anyone ever write as well?
But I never believe a word he says. What he is telling you might be true. The opposite might be true. Anything might be true. Or not. It’s Graham Greene. To treat this as it is presented, as some travelogue of a walk in Liberia in the mid-thirties, taken on a whim, is to be a Norman Sherry: it’s to know the man telling you all this is a liar (the most wonderfully skilled writing liar conceivable, but a liar) and then swallow what he tells you anyway.
Read it for the skill of the writing. But let’s not be a Norman.
I’ve been reading some of the comments on Amazon and Goodreads on Graham Greene’s book before writing this. I’ve read most of Greene’s work, some many times, but not this until just now, and I was interested in what others thought of it. I don’t seem to see it the same way. You can investigate those other opinions for yourself, but here’s a little of my take.
It goes back to Norman Sherry’s fabled three volume biography. In the introduction to Volume Two he writes: ‘In life he was not willing to allow full entrance even to those familiar with his secret life. ‘ (Two ‘life’s’ there: tut tut Sherry) He goes on to state at greater length what is generally accepted as true about Greene’s character: that he put lots of time and energy into concealing himself from all those around him, that he kept secrets privately and professionally, that for example he kept two diaries, that you could hardly ever believe his stated motivation for anything. Sherry follows this description of Greene’s deceptive nature by trotting out that old canard again about him playing Russian roulette six times in five months. His source for this? Greene told him.
There is a great element of this in Journey Without Maps. I suppose that is my main thought about it: that it is a demonstration of both Greene’s wonderful ability with language, and of the untrustworthy nature of his texts. For one thing it was not without maps, and not the map he described as having written across the territory in which he proposed to walk the word ‘Cannibals’.
I don’t know if it’s possible to learn why Greene went outside Europe for the first time and set himself this dirty, dangerous task of walking across Liberia for hundreds of miles, taking his debutante cousin with him, but I do know the narrative consists of some facts mixed with one dodgy bit of information after another. Even the cousin’s age is stated wrongly in newspaper reports of the time, this information presumably given by themselves: she was twenty-eight and not twenty-three.
There is a school of thought on this that Journey Without Maps is a glimpse into a world long gone, and a glimpse into a way of approaching this world, that of the middle-class son of the British Empire venturing abroad in those quieter years before the outbreak of WWII. And of course the other take on it: that it is a journey into the psyche of the participants, or of Greene anyway, for again an untruth, he writes as if he was alone and not accompanied by a cousin who is handling the stresses better than he is.
If it amounts to anything I think it is wonderful writing. We are in some wet, hot , muddy, insect-laden jungle one moment, and back in the Cotswold village were he has left his (unmentioned) wife and months-old child the next, and he makes it all flow and work and resonate and enthral us. Or me anyway. Jesus, could anyone ever write as well?
But I never believe a word he says. What he is telling you might be true. The opposite might be true. Anything might be true. Or not. It’s Graham Greene. To treat this as it is presented, as some travelogue of a walk in Liberia in the mid-thirties, taken on a whim, is to be a Norman Sherry: it’s to know the man telling you all this is a liar (the most wonderfully skilled writing liar conceivable, but a liar) and then swallow what he tells you anyway.
Read it for the skill of the writing. But let’s not be a Norman.
September 3, 2016
it's a different kind of Graham Greene book, I discovered it when i was going to Liberia 1990 and realized there were very few books on Liberia..Liberia was a soul-wrenching experience, a country forgotten and not so different from when GG was there. I carried the book with me and referred to it often and although the material was anachronistic and colonial, it still had some relevance and when I was over-whelmed by the inherent contradictions of what I was seeing, found it comforting.
July 1, 2023
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 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!
July 12, 2011
In 1935 Graham Green traveled by foot from the West African Coast of Sierra Leone, through French Guinea, and into the depths of the Liberian Forest, a region unmapped at the time and labeled with the foreboding word, Cannibals, as the only descriptor as to what he would discover in his travels through the region. Greene’s travels were hardly pure back-country roughing since he was able to hire men to carry his mosquito net, cooking supplies, and a case of whiskey that he drank religiously throughout the 4 week, 350 mile trek. However, despite the bourgeois background to Green’s travels, his purpose was purely exploratory for the sake of learning and other than a brief period near the end when he was suffering with fever, he trekked the entire distance on foot.
Greene traveled into independent Liberia at a time when Europe had already divided up Africa for her own profit and he chose Liberia to explore because it was a nation founded by freed US slaves that presented a unique glimpse of an independent Africa. In his travels he faces a lot of hardship with bats, rats, and cockroaches ever present in the villages the stayed in and chiggers digging their way beneath his finger and toenails. Not all was hardship as Greene discovered many a unique native peoples, each with their own distinct dress, dance, and hospitality. He did not come across any cannibals, but he did encounter devils, spiritual shamans wearing masks that exert great power over the native people. The use of the word devil is only a fault in the English translation of his guides and Greene explains that these devils could very easily be described as angels for their purpose was not a distinction of good or evil, but as guides into the spiritual world.
“In a Christian land we have grown so accustomed to the idea of a Spiritual war, of God and Satan, that this supernatural world, which is neither good nor evil, but is simply Power, is beyond all comprehension.” (176)
It is in these passages depicting the practices of the Liberian people that Greene explores the purpose of his travel through this country. Despite his longing for the comforts of his Western culture, Greene discovers a raw bond of humanity that cannot be found in the Western world. It is in these discoveries that Greene is encouraged with an intense longing to live and make the best of his life – and in reading Journey Without Maps that longing is made clear through Greene’s introspective perspective that makes this a worthwhile read.
Greene traveled into independent Liberia at a time when Europe had already divided up Africa for her own profit and he chose Liberia to explore because it was a nation founded by freed US slaves that presented a unique glimpse of an independent Africa. In his travels he faces a lot of hardship with bats, rats, and cockroaches ever present in the villages the stayed in and chiggers digging their way beneath his finger and toenails. Not all was hardship as Greene discovered many a unique native peoples, each with their own distinct dress, dance, and hospitality. He did not come across any cannibals, but he did encounter devils, spiritual shamans wearing masks that exert great power over the native people. The use of the word devil is only a fault in the English translation of his guides and Greene explains that these devils could very easily be described as angels for their purpose was not a distinction of good or evil, but as guides into the spiritual world.
“In a Christian land we have grown so accustomed to the idea of a Spiritual war, of God and Satan, that this supernatural world, which is neither good nor evil, but is simply Power, is beyond all comprehension.” (176)
It is in these passages depicting the practices of the Liberian people that Greene explores the purpose of his travel through this country. Despite his longing for the comforts of his Western culture, Greene discovers a raw bond of humanity that cannot be found in the Western world. It is in these discoveries that Greene is encouraged with an intense longing to live and make the best of his life – and in reading Journey Without Maps that longing is made clear through Greene’s introspective perspective that makes this a worthwhile read.
June 7, 2015
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.
July 11, 2023
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.
📖❤️
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.
📖❤️
July 13, 2018
As it happens, before I read this book I had already read (and greatly enjoyed) a book that had been inspired by this one that led a man to travel through Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia in dangerous times [1]. I am greatly fond of travel books, and this book is certainly an interesting one, and one that reveals a great deal about the mixed character of Graham Greene as a writer and as a person. As one might easily imagine, it is easy to have mixed feelings about this book. Greene was an observant but also a highly cynical observer, and so this book shares a certain amount of trenchant observations about Liberian life and some commentary that may strike contemporary readers as rather awkward and cringy. Greene was, without a doubt, a man of his own time and while this book is a great travel book, not all of its ideas have necessarily aged well. There are some truths it was possible to tell in his time that cannot be told in our own time without paying an awful price in terms of one's acceptability, and Greene may not have wanted to pay that price.
This sizable book of about 300 pages or so is divided into three parts, each of which is divided into several chapters. It should be remembered that this is a nonfiction work, and moreover a work that is written with a fair bit of subterfuge, as the author was not strictly permitted to travel where he did and had to bluff his way around some of the problems that resulted from this, which were minimized by his dealing graciously with others and his dealing with illiterate civil servants, for the most part in remote parts of countries largely neglected by their ruling elites. The author begins his exploration by talking about his way to Africa (I, 1), the cargo ship he traveled in (I, 2), and his brief trip through Sierra Leone (I, 3). After that the author talks about his time in Western Liberia (II, 1), his meetings with people along the way (II, 2), including a trip into Buzie country (II, 3), and a slightly illegal trip into Guinea (II, 4). After this the author closes with his madcap efforts to get back to the coast and home, with some time spent at a mission statement (III, 1), his skeptical look at civilized LIberians (III, 2), his time in Grand Bassa (III, 3), his exultation upon reaching the port (III, 4), and the postscript in Monrovia dealing with the election that was held at the time (III, 5).
In Journey Without Maps, Greene tells the story of his own trip, on the cheap, through a part of the world that is still mysterious and dangerous. The author's cynicism about the benefits of development and the inability of African realms, whether native or colonial, to provide for the well-being of ordinary people is something that has been born out in contemporary times, and the author's clear-eyed view of the corruption of the realms and in the ways that dark and evil superstition and layers of corruption have been endemic is certainly something that is relevant for contemporary readers, even if the author's noble savage myths are certainly not on point and his paternalistic view may strike many contemporary readers as irksome at best. There are few good ways to write about forgotten and neglected corners of Africa, as to write the truth is bound to offend someone with cultural or political power somewhere, and given that no one wants to accept blame for how things came to be as bad as they are.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
This sizable book of about 300 pages or so is divided into three parts, each of which is divided into several chapters. It should be remembered that this is a nonfiction work, and moreover a work that is written with a fair bit of subterfuge, as the author was not strictly permitted to travel where he did and had to bluff his way around some of the problems that resulted from this, which were minimized by his dealing graciously with others and his dealing with illiterate civil servants, for the most part in remote parts of countries largely neglected by their ruling elites. The author begins his exploration by talking about his way to Africa (I, 1), the cargo ship he traveled in (I, 2), and his brief trip through Sierra Leone (I, 3). After that the author talks about his time in Western Liberia (II, 1), his meetings with people along the way (II, 2), including a trip into Buzie country (II, 3), and a slightly illegal trip into Guinea (II, 4). After this the author closes with his madcap efforts to get back to the coast and home, with some time spent at a mission statement (III, 1), his skeptical look at civilized LIberians (III, 2), his time in Grand Bassa (III, 3), his exultation upon reaching the port (III, 4), and the postscript in Monrovia dealing with the election that was held at the time (III, 5).
In Journey Without Maps, Greene tells the story of his own trip, on the cheap, through a part of the world that is still mysterious and dangerous. The author's cynicism about the benefits of development and the inability of African realms, whether native or colonial, to provide for the well-being of ordinary people is something that has been born out in contemporary times, and the author's clear-eyed view of the corruption of the realms and in the ways that dark and evil superstition and layers of corruption have been endemic is certainly something that is relevant for contemporary readers, even if the author's noble savage myths are certainly not on point and his paternalistic view may strike many contemporary readers as irksome at best. There are few good ways to write about forgotten and neglected corners of Africa, as to write the truth is bound to offend someone with cultural or political power somewhere, and given that no one wants to accept blame for how things came to be as bad as they are.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
June 9, 2014
A deeply disturbing book to read, mainly because of how blithely racist it (and Graham Greene) are, but I read it to gain insight into one of Greene's more flawed novels that I love: A Burnt-Out Case. Journey Without Maps was published in 1936, a year after Greene trekked across Liberia, drinking whiskey the whole way, being carried part-way in a hammock by his black porters, and writing about the sexual desirability of Liberian girls, the crazy (to him) village shamans, the yellow fever/malaria/rats/cockroaches/jiggers (chiggers)that all threatened to kill him. A Burnt-Out Case, set in a leprosy settlement along the Congo River, wasn't published until 1960, but it contains significant traces of Journey Without Maps.
July 27, 2012
Another of the "100 greatest adventure books" that I found it impossible to get through -- I abandoned Greene's book when I was three-quarters of the way through after realizing it wouldn't get much better.
I found Greene's general attitude toward those he met on his walk across Liberia and his treatment of his porters to be really irritating. Nothing much of interest happens on his walk across the country either. A grating narrator and a tepid account of what should have been a grand adventure helps make this book extremely dull.
I found Greene's general attitude toward those he met on his walk across Liberia and his treatment of his porters to be really irritating. Nothing much of interest happens on his walk across the country either. A grating narrator and a tepid account of what should have been a grand adventure helps make this book extremely dull.
August 3, 2016
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.
April 11, 2016
I really, really like the fictional world of Graham Greene's novels but just as I'd never make a true life explorer, on this evidence GG made a lousy chronicler of his real overland travels. I lost the will to live somewhere during his report about a church service in Sierra Leone and didn't make it much further never mind as far as Liberia. Seriously random and seriously dull.
April 3, 2021
I thought this book was a real piece of shit. Although it is called one of the best pieces of travel writing ever, I didn't enjoy it for that or much else. The British imperial attitude/Dark Continent bullshit was laid on so thick I couldn't see much else. I read this book because I am reading the 100 Greatest Adventure Books of All Time and it is number 40. I know that the book is of its time, but even having sensitivity to that (without ACCEPTING the racism/imperialism) his observances about Liberia are weak and boring. I've actually not been so disappointed in a single other of the adventure books in this way and I've made it about 25% or more through the list. So if you have a hankering for adventure books check out A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains or a Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. I was also interested in reading this because Graham Greene has written more than 25 novels, several of which became popular films, and was an agent for M16, but maybe I'm just too invested and interested in a post-imperial, post-colonial world to care.
April 5, 2019
I don’t know if it’s me or the book itself, or the fact that I grabbed this one right after reading Kapuscinski’s extraordinary “The shadow of the sun”, but I found Greene’s account banal, ignorant and at times racist. Very chaotic narrative combined with the old English made it also quite difficult to read and as such, decided to drop the book at some point after half-way through.
May 29, 2025
Epic adventure or booze fuelled madness with a pretty female cousin in West Africa … most likely a mixture of the two with some added hubris and entitlement thrown in … this tale has to be firmly seated in its time and place for context, but non withstanding the casual rascism that pervades the era and this story, there is at its heart a man seeking something and trying his best to guide us thru that journey with him, as honestly as he can.
February 10, 2018
At age 31, Greene traveled to Liberia for four weeks. He went with his cousin, who also wrote a book about this expedition. The journey across Liberia was vivid and interesting. It happened in 1930s, when Nazi was still growing. Liberia got its name because 'liberated' slaves from America emigrated here, and built the first sovereign state in Africa in 1847. However due to its remote location, there was less modern influence. White people were not common then. There were only two maps for this country. The maps contained very little information. It seemed foolish for Westerners to travel to the place. Greene wanted a change in life, maybe searching for inspirations for his next book, he jumped out of the comfort zone.
At first Greene was immersed in the fresh atmosphere of new environment. He was very glad he made the choice. Exotic world lured him, but not for long. When the journey into jungles actually started, he felt himself stupid to put himself in this situation. The journey was not comfortable at all. There were diseases and insects. They needed to cope with rats, cockroaches, flies, beetles, mosquitoes, to name a few. To make things worse, the hot weather could stifle everyone. Greene found out 'plans' wouldn't work out. He realized the best way to finish the journey was to be flexible at all times. Greene even fell into a coma near the end of the trip.
Despite all the misery, Greene still found happiness during the trip. He pondered what travel meant for life. He wrote down some poetic personal reflections. Examining some past memories made him realize more. Traveling was a way to discover one's life. Indeed, Greene certainly found some memorable moments. In addition to Greene's personal feeling, there was abundant observations on local cultures. It is a little outdated now but still shows us a bygone era. The book is an interesting read. It should appeal to readers that are fond of Africa.
Overall: 3.5 stars
At first Greene was immersed in the fresh atmosphere of new environment. He was very glad he made the choice. Exotic world lured him, but not for long. When the journey into jungles actually started, he felt himself stupid to put himself in this situation. The journey was not comfortable at all. There were diseases and insects. They needed to cope with rats, cockroaches, flies, beetles, mosquitoes, to name a few. To make things worse, the hot weather could stifle everyone. Greene found out 'plans' wouldn't work out. He realized the best way to finish the journey was to be flexible at all times. Greene even fell into a coma near the end of the trip.
Despite all the misery, Greene still found happiness during the trip. He pondered what travel meant for life. He wrote down some poetic personal reflections. Examining some past memories made him realize more. Traveling was a way to discover one's life. Indeed, Greene certainly found some memorable moments. In addition to Greene's personal feeling, there was abundant observations on local cultures. It is a little outdated now but still shows us a bygone era. The book is an interesting read. It should appeal to readers that are fond of Africa.
Overall: 3.5 stars
November 12, 2011
I read this book simple because I had just read the Tim Butcher book, Chasing the Devil in which Butcher decides to retread the steps of Graham Greene, as told in this book.
I should have learned. When I read Butcher's first book, I similarly attempted the book of the journey that he tried to follow in that volume as well, and gave up because of the way that Stanley came across. Indeed, in this book it is quite difficult to think that this only happened seventy five or so years ago. Both the land that Greene is visiting, and the land that he comes from, seem awfully alien, so it was hard to get into his head.
His cousin also completes the journey with him, but she barely gets a mention, and in fact often you will forget that she is his travelling companion until there is another throwaway reference.
Greene is fixated on the breasts of the young brown girls. Every pair is described in intimate detail, from the shape, colour, darkness and size of the nipples etcetera, and by the end of the book he just comes across as a dodgy character with a tit fixation. Certainly all of the descriptions help little to enlighten you about the world around him, and tell you more about the way his mind works.
I really wanted to enjoy this, but sadly I could not. The devils were interesting, as they were in the Tim Butcher book, but when Greene finally gets to talk to someone who knows a lot about the subject, he confesses that he was tired and did not note down much of the conversation, which he could subsequently recall little of. Oh well.
It took me ages to read - not because it is a large book, but because it did not keep my interest. I did manage to complete it after picking at it for several weeks, which felt like a bit of an achievement to be honest, but I won't be rushing about to read more Graham Greene any time soon!
I should have learned. When I read Butcher's first book, I similarly attempted the book of the journey that he tried to follow in that volume as well, and gave up because of the way that Stanley came across. Indeed, in this book it is quite difficult to think that this only happened seventy five or so years ago. Both the land that Greene is visiting, and the land that he comes from, seem awfully alien, so it was hard to get into his head.
His cousin also completes the journey with him, but she barely gets a mention, and in fact often you will forget that she is his travelling companion until there is another throwaway reference.
Greene is fixated on the breasts of the young brown girls. Every pair is described in intimate detail, from the shape, colour, darkness and size of the nipples etcetera, and by the end of the book he just comes across as a dodgy character with a tit fixation. Certainly all of the descriptions help little to enlighten you about the world around him, and tell you more about the way his mind works.
I really wanted to enjoy this, but sadly I could not. The devils were interesting, as they were in the Tim Butcher book, but when Greene finally gets to talk to someone who knows a lot about the subject, he confesses that he was tired and did not note down much of the conversation, which he could subsequently recall little of. Oh well.
It took me ages to read - not because it is a large book, but because it did not keep my interest. I did manage to complete it after picking at it for several weeks, which felt like a bit of an achievement to be honest, but I won't be rushing about to read more Graham Greene any time soon!
January 24, 2013
Greene traveled to Sierra Leone and Liberia in 1936, starting in Freetown, making his way, by train, to the far eastern part of the country, from which, overland, he made his way to the Liberian coast, by passing through Guinea.
Greene is overly dramatic a, self confessed, amateur traveler and, really, a pussy, but the book is still interesting, because it paints a picture of the countries traveled from a perspective and a time now lost.
Now, the train back east doesn't run anymore, having been dismantled by president Siaka Stevens (what a name, eh?) in the 70s. The local train, from town up into the hills, had already stopped running in Greene's time.
The book shows how, already 70 years ago, Freetown, and, by extension, with that, urban Africa, sadly, was degrading slowly. Later, when Greene arrived in Monrovia, this image of Africa is reinforced.
Greene's experiences up country need to be taken with several grains of salt. On a few occasions, he mentions the potential existence of cannibals, which might have never existed and certainly didn't when Green was moving around, and his statements that, in several places, Greene and his traveling companion are the only whites visiting in living memory are as unlikely as laughable.
After his four week, only, stint, his first visit to Africa, Greene moved to Freetown and staid there for a year, in 1941, on which he wrote another book, The Heart of the Matter.
The bits I enjoyed best were Greene's occasional introspections into his own recent experiences in Europe, shortly after the depression, during the rise of Nazi Germany.
Greene is overly dramatic a, self confessed, amateur traveler and, really, a pussy, but the book is still interesting, because it paints a picture of the countries traveled from a perspective and a time now lost.
Now, the train back east doesn't run anymore, having been dismantled by president Siaka Stevens (what a name, eh?) in the 70s. The local train, from town up into the hills, had already stopped running in Greene's time.
The book shows how, already 70 years ago, Freetown, and, by extension, with that, urban Africa, sadly, was degrading slowly. Later, when Greene arrived in Monrovia, this image of Africa is reinforced.
Greene's experiences up country need to be taken with several grains of salt. On a few occasions, he mentions the potential existence of cannibals, which might have never existed and certainly didn't when Green was moving around, and his statements that, in several places, Greene and his traveling companion are the only whites visiting in living memory are as unlikely as laughable.
After his four week, only, stint, his first visit to Africa, Greene moved to Freetown and staid there for a year, in 1941, on which he wrote another book, The Heart of the Matter.
The bits I enjoyed best were Greene's occasional introspections into his own recent experiences in Europe, shortly after the depression, during the rise of Nazi Germany.
May 28, 2015
Journey Without Maps is, quite frankly, a piece of travel writing that’s taken on historical significance, the true story of Graham Greene’s first ever journey outside of Europe, across the border of Sierra Leone and in to Africa. It was also first published in 1936, before even the outbreak of the Second World War – as you can imagine, white men were neither common nor welcome in Liberia and the neighbouring areas, and so Greene’s work makes for incredibly interesting reading.
Sure, it can be tedious at times, purely because it’s hard work to imagine what it was actually like to go on that journey of his, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting – it’s just heavy going, and not the type of book you can read without really thinking. That’s probably why it’s just as good for the casual reader as it is for the academic, who wants to learn more about Africa in the 30s. If you fit in either category then it’s definitely worth buying.
In fact, if anything, it’s just as exciting as any of his novels, as if it’s made somehow more real by the fact that Greene himself is the central character, as well as the narrator. Besides, the journey itself would be no longer possible, I’m sure of it – the world has moved on in the last eighty years, for better or worse.
Sure, it can be tedious at times, purely because it’s hard work to imagine what it was actually like to go on that journey of his, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting – it’s just heavy going, and not the type of book you can read without really thinking. That’s probably why it’s just as good for the casual reader as it is for the academic, who wants to learn more about Africa in the 30s. If you fit in either category then it’s definitely worth buying.
In fact, if anything, it’s just as exciting as any of his novels, as if it’s made somehow more real by the fact that Greene himself is the central character, as well as the narrator. Besides, the journey itself would be no longer possible, I’m sure of it – the world has moved on in the last eighty years, for better or worse.
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