Review | There’s Marco Polo but no Bill Bryson, Colin Thubron but no Thomas Coryat – author’s critical examination of travel writing has gaps
- Tim Hannigan sets out to ask travel writers, many male and mainly English (there’s no Bill Bryson), what travel writing is, having once wanted to be one himself
- He pulls apart the tricks of the travel writer’s trade while employing them amply himself, yet doesn’t satisfactorily answer the question with which he began
The Travel Writing Tribe – Journeys in Search of a Genre by Tim Hannigan, pub. Hurst
Tim Hannigan admits to an obsession with travel writing and travel writers dating back to his teenage years, and as a young man he “took unconsciously to aping their pose and their prose in the diaries I scribbled as I rattled around the backpacker circuits of Asia”.
This much he reveals early in The Travel Writing Tribe – Journeys in Search of a Genre, his examination of the nature of travel writing, why its long form has been in decline for some time, and what its future might be.
So it is a surprise when, 242 pages later, he writes, “I’ll state it plainly now, though not without embarrassment: when I was in my early twenties, I wanted very much to be a travel writer.” This has been obvious all along.
By now readers may not be unhappy that this ambition has been given up. Trips to various corners of Britain to interview his heroes include overwrought and irrelevant scene-setting paragraphs that read as though constructed according to guidelines in some travel-writing manual but are perhaps just a continuance of the aping already admitted.