The true art of travel writing

History, people, self-deprecation - what makes a good travel book? Here's a look at a few of the essential ingredients

In September I visited Spain for the first time. Like so many others who go to some new country, I wanted to buy a book about it before I got there. And like many people I made a mistake.

After due diligence I bought the book on Spain by the late Raymond Carr, an Oxford don. It is an academic classic with a huge amount of information, written in the dry one-damned-thing-after-another mode of history writing. But it wasn’t a travel book by any stretch. I had planned to read it on the flight but soon got tired of it and began thinking about travel writing in general.

It’s an art and only a few have mastered it. Its main ingredient is a must-have superior attitude that embellishes simple things with irony and makes foreigners look so peculiar as to be slightly crazy.

The first travel book I read was in the 1980s. It was by Paul Theroux about the railways of the world. After that I managed to read almost all his travel books. Some were quite awful. But the book on the greatest weirdos of the world, the English, is a real page turner. It’s called The Kingdom by the Sea. However, the most unusual subject chosen by a travel writer, at least in my opinion, is the Indian monsoon by Alexander Frater. It is called Chasing the Monsoon. It’s an absolute masterpiece. He started in Trivandrum on June 1 and followed the rain till Cherrapunji in September. He wrote several other books, including one on retracing the route flown by those Pan Am round-the- world flights. I have subsequently bought and read all his other books as well. It’s money well spent.

Simon Winchester, the English journalist who was sent away by the government during the Emergency, has also written several, including one on South Korea. He wrote it in the 1980s and I have always wondered why he chose Korea. It’s not a great book and it’s about 30 years old now. Even so, if you are going there for the first time, I would recommend it.

And of course there is Jan Morris. Her writing is a very nice combination of people and places.

The late Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity American chef, has also written a book, called, quite simply, World Travel. Bombay figures in it and, because he was a chef, the food you get there. It’s a very carefully written or edited book. There’s nothing there to offend any locals. Nearly a 100 cities figure in it.

Sadly, there aren’t many good Indian travel writers. One of the best is Biswanath Ghosh, a former colleague at The Hindu. But most Indian travel writers seem to prefer to write travel guides. At least, that’s the impression I have.

So, what makes a travel book interesting? The answer is people. Good travel writers don’t write about places; they write about people and other unpleasant surprises.

This makes you wonder sometimes as to why they thought you’d be interested in what a bartender or a begum said. But the manner of telling the story is what makes the difference between a good travel book and an average one. They use very few adjectives in their writing and practically no negative ones. A good travel writer conveys his or her reactions without offending anyone.

The best writers also manage to add some self-deprecation. The British excel at it. The Americans don’t bother to make the effort. They just say it like it is.

The trick, I think, lies in writing calmly and without irritation. And when you are travelling, there are many things that can be very irritating. So it’s hard to resist the temptation to pour out your prejudices. Take, for instance, the humongous airport at Madrid. Why do they need such a sprawl to handle so few flights? From start to finish we walked three kilometres to our gate.

But coming back to my Spain trip, I found a book called Granada in the house in which we stayed. It had been left behind by someone who had stayed there at some point.

It wasn’t a travel book. It was a history of Granada and there’s plenty of it. The author is an American who simply moved with his family to Granada to write the book.

It was fascinating to read about the way the Christian rulers expelled the Jews and the Muslims from the city in 1492. The order was “convert or quit”. Most non-Christians quit.

The entire eviction operation was over in about five years. Granada never recovered from the shock of losing its economic engines.