Journey Without Maps

I’ve been reading some of the comments on Amazon and Goodreads on Graham Greene’s book before writing this. I’ve read most of Greene’s work, some many times, but not this until just now, and I was interested in what others thought of it. I don’t seem to see it the same way. You can investigate those other opinions for yourself, but here’s a little of my take.

It goes back to Norman Sherry’s fabled three volume biography. In the introduction to Volume Two he writes: ‘In life he was not willing to allow full entrance even to those familiar with his secret life. ‘ (Two ‘life’s’ there: tut tut Sherry) He goes on to state at greater length what is generally accepted as true about Greene’s character: that he put lots of time and energy into concealing himself from all those around him, that he kept secrets privately and professionally, that for example he kept two diaries, that you could hardly ever believe his stated motivation for anything. Sherry follows this description of Greene’s deceptive nature by trotting out that old canard again about him playing Russian roulette six times in five months. His source for this? Greene told him.

There is a great element of this in Journey Without Maps. I suppose that is my main thought about it: that it is a demonstration of both Greene’s wonderful ability with language, and of the untrustworthy nature of his texts. For one thing it was not without maps, and not the map he described as having written across the territory in which he proposed to walk the word ‘Cannibals’.

I don’t know if it’s possible to learn why Greene went outside Europe for the first time and set himself this dirty, dangerous task of walking across Liberia for hundreds of miles, taking his debutante cousin with him, but I do know the narrative consists of some facts mixed with one dodgy bit of information after another. Even the cousin’s age is stated wrongly in newspaper reports of the time, this information presumably given by themselves: she was twenty-eight and not twenty-three.

There is a school of thought on this that Journey Without Maps is a glimpse into a world long gone, and a glimpse into a way of approaching this world, that of the middle-class son of the British Empire venturing abroad in those quieter years before the outbreak of WWII. And of course the other take on it: that it is a journey into the psyche of the participants, or of Greene anyway, for again an untruth, he writes as if he was alone and not accompanied by a cousin who is handling the stresses better than he is.

If it amounts to anything I think it is wonderful writing. We are in some wet, hot , muddy, insect-laden jungle one moment, and back in the Cotswold village were he has left his (unmentioned) wife and months-old child the next, and he makes it all flow and work and resonate and enthral us. Or me anyway. Jesus, could anyone ever write as well?

But I never believe a word he says. What he is telling you might be true. The opposite might be true. Anything might be true. Or not. It’s Graham Greene. To treat this as it is presented, as some travelogue of a walk in Liberia in the mid-thirties, taken on a whim, is to be a Norman Sherry: it’s to know the man telling you all this is a liar (the most wonderfully skilled writing liar conceivable, but a liar) and then swallow what he tells you anyway.

Read it for the skill of the writing. But let’s not be a Norman.