Journey Without Maps

I can't truthfully say I enjoyed this book, despite my love of Graham Greene. Being Greene, the writing soars at times, but for the most part I struggled with the tedium, which may simply reflect the tedium of the journey itself. Clearly Greene himself struggles with it. He makes vague claims about casting off civilised sophistication and searching for the primitive self, but I do struggle with his motivations for undertaking such a miserable trek. Hundreds of miles of monotonous jungle, village after festering village, will-sapping heat, mosquitos, jiggers, an endless fight to keep the hired native carriers in line, and the ever-present risk of running out of whiskey. Perhaps it all seemed like a good idea at the time? I remember once thinking the same thing about a holiday on the Gold Coast...

For reasons known only to Greene, he chooses to dispense of the female cousin who accompanied him with just the occasional mention, and in the end we know next to nothing of her, or her journey. And it's hard to not notice Greene's fascination with black breasts. One wonders whether he was aware of it as he wrote, or whether it infected the manuscript in cod-Freudian fashion. Perhaps it was simply the novelty of exposed boobs? They weren't common in post-Victorian England, as we all know.

Anyway, by the time Greene made the beach at Monrovia, I was only too glad to climb into the surf boat with him and board the steamer that whisked us away from 1930s Liberia. He'd had enough. So had I.