A Traveller’s Tale – How To Love and Not Get Lost
A travel guide – essential reading before any holiday, after all, you need to know where you’re going, the necessary vaccinations, the projected weather, the anticipated tourist sites – all useful information covered under one cover. And once your sensible walking shoes hit the ground, the travel guide’s map will pinpoint your hotel while steering you away from seedy areas where you may be mugged. Yes, travel guides like to cover their a***s. Having travelled with many such guides, I feel it’s important to explain their limitations.
Non-fiction books are also useful when planning to explore a new country. Some full of wit and candour written by writers who’ve travelled a well-trodden path. Others written by dry scholars which you may find valuable as sleep aids on a plane. When you arrive, an obligatory tourist guide will likely tell you well-versed tales. But it’s only when there’s narrative: real events and local characters mixed with creativity and a twisty plot that a writer of fiction can conjure up a story and reveal what guide and history books cannot. We know the minutiae, the everyday, the first-hand experiences. We can be read in a palpable way. We create reality.
Whether we fiction writers love or hate or love-hate a country, our connection to it has affected us in a profound way. We can interpret how its countrymen navigate prejudice, oppression, freedom, fulfilment – all the traditions and distinctions that make a country unique. The plot grips you from within and colours your experience. We amplify it all. But there is another option.
Armchair travellers stay glued to home ground for a variety of reasons: the expense, the distance, the danger – all sound reasons an armchair traveller will only visit a country through its literature. But do not underestimate the power of story. Just one story about one country could pry you from the indentation on your armchair and have you checking to see if your passport is still valid. There’s an explanation for that.
‘A story with a beginning, middle and end with obstacles to overcome almost lights up the entire brain compared to a PowerPoint presentation which only lights up 5%,’ states psychologist Marcy Pusey. ‘That’s because the characters are using critical thinking and making decisions about the challenges that arise. This leaves you wondering, “What If I’m in a situation like this one day? I want to know how this person gets through it and whether it works or doesn’t work.” Then your brain files all that away and makes you resilient so that when you get there you can handle it.’ The story becomes your story.
Let me illuminate. I grew up with free-range parents who let me travel around London from a young age. I think I can thank them for giving me the confidence to travel the world at an older one. Books like James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy took me to Peru; Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude to Columbia; Ben Okri’s The Famished Road to Africa. But the one that really got to me was somewhat unexpected.
A Finnish godmother gifted me a series of Tove Jansson’s Moomin books when I was a child. The Moomin experts describe the Moomin philosophy for life as ‘… rooted in the core values of love, tolerance and adventure.’ I think reading those books lit up my ripening brain. Revisiting them over dank London days, I fell in love with Finland.
Samuel Johnson (the creator of that 1755 brick of an English dictionary) once said, ‘… when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life …’ and he is correct. Living in a country run by an economist (remember Gordon Brown) and working in a PowerPoint-fixated office, I found I needed a break. I wanted to go to a country rooted in the core values of love, tolerance and adventure. A holiday was in order. I packed my Moomin books.
Sitting in a deckchair reading; bobbing on a jetty thinking; making a decision and smiling – I wasn’t going anywhere. The story had consumed me. Peru, Columbia, Africa: all great locations, but I was staying put in Finland. So do not underestimate the power of fiction. It takes you on a poignant journey. It lights up your brain. It’s the only way to travel.