Journey without Maps (Vintage Classics)
£2.98
An interesting slog from a different era and a facinating country - The other reviewer is right to call this account a slog, but that is precisely what Greene s journey was. He decided to journey through a land where a white man is seen perhaps twice a decade, to people who live a simple life.If you re looking for a thrilling, edge-of-your-seat novel of semi-truths this is not the book for you. If you have an interest in West Africa, Liberia, native living, superstition, colonialism, exploration, and generally Greene as a person this book is good. I found digesting in two chunks a more managable read.Certainly very different to Greene s other writings, but for me gave an interesting perspective on an unusual country and a remarkable man.
West African Travel When It Was A Little Less Dangerous... - Today, West Africa is probably more dangerous than it was in the 1930 s, when this was penned. Greene later served as a British SIS operative in Sierra Leone, during WW2. Reading this book now is not to reflect that not much has changed, but that some parts (at least Sierra Leone) were far more civilized then than they are now (i.e. since Independence, corruption, civil war, mutilated civilians etc), for all that Greene expiates on the boring provincial British inhabiting the few decent bars and hotels, rather in a reversal almost of the manner of Waugh (Evelyn, not his self-satisfied semi-cretin son Auberon), who declared Australia to be a huge continent, entirely inhabited by the lower classes. Greene has never been a writer appealing much to this reviewer, an odd mixture of snobbery and reversed snobbery perhaps springing from his Quaker or nonconformist roots. This book is one of his more readable, perhaps because factual. It is, however, like his West African journey, an undistinguished slog.