ONCE IN A VERY LONG TIME you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.
With such a book the impact isn’t necessarily obvious at first… but the more you read it and re-read it, and live with it, and travel with it, the more it speaks to you, and the more you realize that you cannot live without that book. It’s then that the wisdom hidden inside, the seed, is passed on.
The Songlines first appeared more than twenty years ago. It was the book that made British travel writer Bruce Chatwin a bestselling author. And it is the book that established him as an oddball genius, a giant of the travel genre, and a writer whose works commented on the human condition as much as they did on the lands which passed beneath his feet.
During his short life, Chatwin published only a handful of books. Some were fact, others fiction, and all were a blend of both. They were the kind of books that many people had waited a lifetime to read: pithy, lyrical, and capable of easing the reader down through layer after layer until they hit raw metal, a mirror in which they saw themselves.
The Songlines is Chatwin’s masterwork. I remember the day I first saw it.
I was standing outside a bookshop in Nairobi, staring in at the window display of titles I couldn’t afford. A man sidled up, nudged me in the ribs, and jabbed a thumb at the hardback book:
‘That’s a cracker,’ he said.
‘I can’t afford it,’ I replied. ‘I’ve only got enough cash for lunch.’
The man nudged me again.
‘Go hungry,’ he said.
I handed over my money and entered a world where the sharpest realism touches far-flung fantasy. Since then I have carried the book with me on almost all my journeys. It’s always there, at the bottom of my bag, a trusted friend that can be opened at random and can pacify me in moments of solitude.
My copy has been through the Namib Desert and the Sahara, across the Amazon, twice, over the Himalayas, and through the Madre de Dios cloud forest in Peru, where I was almost tempted to trade it for an exquisite macaw-feather crown. It has been a pillow, and a fly-swat, and entertainment in a small Ethiopian village when I had the runs, for days. And, it was one of two books I was permitted in my cell during the weeks I spent in solitary confinement in a Pakistani prison.
The Songlines is about the Australian Outback and the Aboriginals, who, through history, have roamed the vast, desert region, walking softly on the Earth. It is a journey of sorts, and a catalogue of meetings with ordinary people and eccentrics, each of them making do in the furnace of central Australia. It is about the essence of humanity, the lust of a nomadic existence, and about rejecting a world of materialism, a world that Chatwin must have suspected he might soon depart. While writing it, he had already been diagnosed with HIV.
Chatwin’s career began in the art world. He used to say he picked up the skill of writing detailed descriptions while working at Sotheby’s, where he had been made the youngest partner in the firm’s history. It’s a skill that resonates through all his writing, no more brilliantly than in this book. The initial character descriptions in particular are works of art.
The Songlines kicks off with Chatwin meeting Arkady Volchok, an Australian of Russian heritage, whose father was a Cossack. For Chatwin there was nothing so irresistible as a person found in a habitat that was at odds to the one from which he had come. He was of course a character for his collection, as was Arkady, who was surely an extension of himself. The people he collected were woven into his books, and described, turned into the light, and described again. None of them do very much in The Songlines, except to spit out a few succinct lines of words; but their appearance is enough – gems glinting for our delight.
No one fascinated Chatwin more than polymaths, people with a diverse range of knowledge and experience. He was one himself, of course, as was Theodor Strehlow, the character whose book Songs of Central Australia first activated his interest in so-called Songlines. Strehlow was an anthropologist of Austrian extraction, who had spent years in the Outback, and was adopted into an Aboriginal clan, the elders of which had entrusted him with their secrets. In his youth, he had been schooled in the Aboriginal dialect Aranda, as well as in Classical Greek, Latin, German and English, while raised at a Lutheran mission: all of it food for Chatwin’s vivid imagination.
Strehlow recorded the native Australian concepts of Songlines, and Dreamtime, and he mapped out a kind of blueprint that may have been a template for all primitive man. Chatwin was hooked from the start, and must have found in Strehlow’s work, as his biographer Nicholas Shakespeare puts it, ‘a structure on which to hang not only his nomad theories, but more or less everything else in his notebooks…’
Then, a little over half way through the narrative, the reader hits just that – a long italicised section labelled ‘From The Notebooks’. It’s something that even divides diehard fans of the Chatwinesque: a collection of aphorisms, ideas, and obscure details of culture and history. For my money, it’s the icing on the cake, the treasury of a short but brilliant life of observation. The section reflects Chatwin’s essence. It covers a world of obscure destinations – Kabul, Omdurman, Yunnan and Timbuktu. And it shines a beam of light onto aspects of human belief from which we have become distanced or removed.
Since his death early in 1989, Chatwin has been feted for his good looks, his love of distinguished company, and for his personal life. An enormous amount has been written on him, not least by his official biographer Nicholas Shakespeare, whose warts-and-all life story is two inches thick.
Sometimes you get the feeling that Chatwin is famous for being famous, that people are so caught up with him as an icon, that they forget to read his books. They pore over his private life, tracing his long-lost love affairs, and searching for skeletons in closets that I believe would best be left alone. Or they waste their time in dissection – trying to work out where the fact comes to an end and where the fantasy begins. For me, that’s all nonsense: Chatwin ought to be remembered instead as the pre-eminent storyteller, the raconteur, the man whose prose has perfect rhythm, and whose books walk the fine tightrope between fact and fantasy.
The Songlines works so powerfully, because in the native Aboriginals of the Outback Chatwin found himself. He was drawn to their gentle interpretation of the world, and to the way their dreamtime ascended far above the black and white world in which our own lives are sometimes confined.
Literary reviewers may have attacked Chatwin for over-romanticizing his subject, but they were not the only critics. The Aboriginals themselves felt short-changed by the way they were depicted in the book – fodder for Chatwin’s theories on nomadic life. And some found it odd that for a book on Aboriginal belief, the author spent such little time actually with Aboriginals, and so much with the wacky cast of immigrants who people the Outback.
As for my own travels with the book, the most touching moment came in Senegal. One night in the capital, Dakar, I was sitting in a café waiting for the sun to go down. The heat was terrible, and the place was packed with femmes de la rue parading themselves, hoping to attract a fresh infection-free clientele. I was alone, and ferreted The Songlines from the bottom of my bag. The waiter slapped down a glass of café noir and looked at me sideways.
‘He came here once,’ he said.
‘Who did?’
‘That man?’
‘Who?’
‘The blonde one,’ he said, pointing to the author photo on the back of the book.
‘Chatwin?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you talk to him?’
‘Yes I did.’
‘Do you remember the conversation?’
‘Yes I do.’
‘What did you talk about?’
The waiter looked out at the road, and wiped a hand across his mouth.
‘We spoke about silence,’ he said.
He wafted away. I opened The Songlines at random, and my eyes found a Moorish proverb favoured by Chatwin:
‘He who does not travel does not know the value of men.’