The Best of Granta Travel

This is a book full of heavy hitters. I mean, this is a seriously impressive line-up of authors, in an incredible array of locations, such that I don't think I can avoid listing them.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a tourist in Galacia, Spain
Todd McEwen in Chicago, USA
Jonathan Raban, going nautical in the UK
James Fenton, on visits to Cambodia
Redmond O'Hanlon in Borneo
Bruce Chatwin, caught up in the coup in Benin
Paul Theroux in the New York subway
Patrick Marnham, with Idi Amin in Uganda
Salman Rushdie in Nicaragua
Colin Thurbron in Nanjing, China
Martha Gelhorn in Cuba
Amitav Ghosh in Egypt
Ryszard Kapuscinski, accompanying a corpse in Poland
Bill Bryson in his home town of Des Moines, Iowa, USA
Norman Lewis hanging out in Essex, UK
Nicholas Shakespeare, tracing the Shining Path in Peru
Ian Jack in Bihar, India
Graham Swift tracking Jiri Wolf in Czechoslovakia
Neal Ascherson in the borderlands of Belarus, Poland and Ukraine
Isabel Hinton in Paraguay at the absconding of Stroessner
Christopher Hitchens in Hungary & Romania

I really think they missed a more correct title for this publication. This is a massively political book – in that I don't consider many of these stories “travel”. There are many stories that are political reportage, or at least reportage of political events. It is also important to remember that his collection of stories was published in 1991, with the stories dating from ‘84 to '90 – I feel old, being able to say these are political events which happened over 30 years ago! As such many of these stories come across as dated, and perhaps a little obscure.

There are some gems in here though. James Fenton's Cambodian piece (Fenton perhaps better known as Redmond O'Hanlon's sidekick in the rivers of Borneo) and O'Hanlon's always-fantastic tales of Borneo, Amitav Ghosh, Chatwin, Shakespeare and Ian Jack were all excellent, and any two or three of these stories alone is worth “the price of admission” here. There are another half dozen interesting enough stories, and then some that didn't work for me.

An easy 3 stars, pushing up close to 4 stars, but perhaps not quite. I suspect if I rated each story and totalled up, there would be a similar number of 5 star stories and 2 star stories, and then a few more 3 star than 4 star stories left.

3 stars.