Travels in time and space

Press, 18 December 1976, Page 17

Travels in time and space

Travels. By Jan Morris. Faber and Faber. 155 pp. $10.30. (Reviewed by Robin Smith) Jan Morris has an eye for the extraordinary. She quickly cuts beneath the surface of people and places to winkle out what lies beneath Her taste and judgment are cultivated and she has a fine style. She describes her life as “a prolonged and fascinating quest.” What she writes of cities and people in her third volume of collected travel essays, succeeds because of her quest for what lies behind the facades that most travellers content themselves with — be they facades of houses, cities or people. The essays range as far apart in time as in space — from the travels of a fourteenth century Moroccan theologian to the fascinating modern city-state, Singapore. The story of Ibn Batuta, the Moroccan traveller who, by sea, by land, on foot, by camel, and on horseback, covered at least 75,000 miles, is a story for our times as much as his. Jan Morris describes with feeling and sympathy the ancient spa town of Bath, where the houses “burgeon with

plaques recording the residence r>f writers, and admirals empire builders and politicians.” But too often, she says, “they only spent a season there in rented lodgings, recuperating for another battle, or correcting proofs.” Such is the nature of fame. It is quickly put in its place by the author's uncompromising judgment. Of the people of Washington (“Fames Stamping Ground”) she writes that nowhere in the world do people take themselves so seriously or seem so indifferent to other perceptions than their own. And the nature of Washington is another legacy of “those damned French.” “It was a rotten idea, disastrously copied in such dumps as Canberra. Brasilia and Islamabad.” These essays take the reader all over the world, and through many ages: to Dublin, to Hong Kong, to Edinburgh, and by sail to the India of the eighteenth century. The places and people are diverse; the comments remain unerringly strict. Back m Washington she says: “There is only a difference of scale, not of value, between pretending to like a picture you detest, and charging the State for improvements at San Clemente.”