Journey without maps

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!

1) ''We, like Wordsworth, are living after a war and a revolution, and these half-castes fighting with bombs between the cliffs of skyscrapers seem more likely than we to be aware of Proteus rising from the sea. It is not, of course, that one wishes to stay forever at that level, but when one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray.''

2) ''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 can be imagined as saying, you can't avoid it, there it is 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.''

3) ''I thought of Vande in the dark urging the carriers over the long gaping swaying bridge at Duogobmai; I remembered they had never had the goat to guard them from the elephants. It wouldn't have been any use now. We were all of us back in the hands of adolescence, and I thought rebelliously: I am glad, for here is iced beer and a wireless set which will pick up the Empire programme from Daventry, and after all it is home, in the sense that we have been taught to know home, where we will soon forget the finer taste, the finer pleasure, the finer terror on which we might have built.''