‘The season’s most companionable poetry collection is written by an undertaker from Michigan,’ PAGE 22


On the Greene trail


Chasing the Devil: the search for Africa’s fighting spirit Tim Butcher


CHATTO & WINDUS, 325PP, £18.99 ■Tablet Bookshop price £17.10


wearing magic wigs, so that’s what I want,” said Tim Butcher’s editor at the The Daily Telegraph. Like a good reporter, that’s what he went and found. The year was 2000: Charles Taylor’s marauders were running amok; two of his fellow correspondents were killed by militia, and a third escaped by hiding in the bush. Now Butcher is back, this time on the


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“itfo” trail (as an “In-The-Footsteps-Of” book is sometimes known). His first book was a highly coloured, melodramatic yarn, itfo the explorer Stanley down the Congo River. Now he’s itfo Graham Greene who, with his cousin Barbara, trekked through Liberia in 1935. Both Greenes wrote books about their trip, which ended with Greene nearly dying of fever. Butcher starts off with all the adrenalin-pumping, high-octane Africa-is-insane-hell prose you would expect, from his earlier experiences. This trip, by contrast, is pretty tame – bus across Sierra Leone, a three-week, 250-mile walk across Liberia following Greene’s route from village to village. UN peacekeepers are still installed, and Butcher suffers no more serious inconvenience than blisters and tiredness. Greene travelled with three servants, plus


65 porters. He and his cousin were often carried in hammocks and the whole enterprise could have taken place in 1890, so colonial was it. Butcher takes a 24-year-old male understrapper who promises faithfully not to hog the limelight or argue the toss en route, and true to his word is largely silent throughout. Both chaps are private-school and Oxford-educated, Butcher is at pains to assure us, and so the right types for bush adventures. There is a local guide, Johnson, and a motorbike-riding porter, Mr Omaru. Carrying only daypacks, with five litres of water apiece as well as GPS and mobile phones, they follow Johnson along the bush paths. Graham Greene hated the jungle, hated,


in fact, the whole trip. Butcher likes the jungle and gets on well with Africans. As a journalist, he is adept at getting people to talk, and whereas Greene was not the slightest bit interested in what Africans had


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hen people think of Liberia they think of drug-crazed gunmen


to say, Butcher is, and the reported speech in this book is its strongest element. As the photos show, when he started out, Butcher was a 41-year-old pudgy white man, unused to exercise: his blisters and exhaustion come from lack of training beforehand. He gets close to heatstroke and omits to take either sodium or potassium tablets to replace mineral salts lost in sweating. Although an old Africa hand, he seems a greenhorn at bush-walking, and makes heavy weather of what is in effect a gentle stroll through undemanding country. At one point, Mr Omaru doesn’t turn up as expected with the rucksacks and Butcher realises he couldn’t finish the trip without his kit. For all its hi-tech trendiness, Butcher’s hike is as dependent as the Greenes’ on the expertise of local porters and guides. Against the odds, two villagers in their eighties remember the Greene expedition 74 years before. Butcher doesn’t ask the obvious question: “Any other whites been walking this trail between the Greenes and us?” Almost certainly the answer would have been no.


NOVEL OF THE WEEK Bye-bye, Mr Bingley


The Three Weissmanns of Westport Cathleen Schine CORSAIR, 292PP, £11.99 ■Tablet Bookshop price £10.80


Jane Austen. And these, too, are the things that matter in The Three Weissmanns of Westport. Cathleen Schine’s fictional terrain is upper-middle-class New York – not the super-rich, but those to whom financial tremors are a real possibility. Her characters have been used to lives of


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comfort and (mostly) calm; however, in a reversal of fortune, they are cast out, like the distressed gentlefolk of old. Joseph, the Weissmann paterfamilias, decides, in his seventies, to divorce his wife Betty. They have an apartment, lovingly


decorated by Betty, and they have Betty’s two daughters from a previous marriage, now in their middle age: Miranda is childless and has her own literary agency, while Annie works in a private library and adores her two sons. Joseph, although he doesn’t admit it at first, has a younger lover. Schine has a beautifully spiky prose style, her technique being to build up to a sting in the tail: “And so it was decided. Joe would


oney, status, marriage: these are the things that matter in the novels of


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Off the road system, village Africa remains largely unchanged. This lack of development Butcher considers a failing. Where Butcher observes poverty and deprivation, others discern sturdy self-reliance and self-sufficiency. Butcher judges the collectivist and anti-individualist ethos of the quasi-magical, secret “bush societies” as holding back development of the nation state. Others consider it a vital link with a still viable, 40,000-year-old hunting-gathering cooperative tradition. The year-long rites of passage that the young have to go through, involving forced basic survival training on very little food and water in deep bush, provides a safe haven for the community when vulnerable villages are destroyed, as they have been, time and time again. “I ran away and hid in the bush” is the response Butcher gets from dozens of locals who fled the Taylor militias. In Africa, this is an old story. If Butcher had to flee into the jungle, he would die very quickly. Many of his “poor”, “underdeveloped” villagers would survive. Robert Carver


be generous and keep the apartment.” One catastrophe follows upon another.


Miranda’s agency specialises in “misery memoirs”, and her three highest-profile clients are exposed as frauds: “the Midwestern housewife Sarah-Gail Laney, who wrote about her painful search for normality after being raised by sexually abusive missionaries who poisoned each other in Uganda, had actually been raised in Hoboken.” All but destroyed, emotionally and monetarily, the daughters and their mother move out to a cottage in Westport, a fleetingly fashionable seaside town.


Schine is a patient and careful observer of her characters, showing them with all their failures and foibles. When Miranda, out kayaking, almost drowns and is rescued, she has the presence of mind to be “amused at the thought of a God with the imagination to drop her into the embrace of an Adonis”. She relaxes “enthusiastically into the young hero’s arms”. When both Miranda and Annie are disappointed in love (Miranda with her Adonis, and Annie with a smooth-talking novelist), it is as if Jane had her Mr Bingley taken away. Schine’s novel is a fine-spun fiction, as far from the misery memoirs of Miranda’s authors as possible. Here tragedy is present, but all the more effective for its quietness: and here too is the lightness and joy of humanity, and the permanence of hope. Philip Womack


11 December 2010 | THE TABLET | 21


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