Book Review: Deep South (2015) by Paul Theroux

A new Paul Theroux travel book is always a cause for celebration, and while I certainly enjoyed a lot of Deep South, other portions left a bad taste in my mouth. Theroux's odyssey through America's Deep South is illuminating, thorough, and heartfelt, but also wrong-headed and occasionally condescending.

I knew there was trouble ahead when Theroux began the book with a diatribe about the indignities of air travel: the delays, the security, the searches, and so on and so on. This specific kind of whining is the special province of older, white, affluent writers, and I expected Theroux to be better than this. No one likes airport security, but the alternative is too grisly to contemplate. Unfortunately, Theroux then goes the extra mile from whingeing all the way to pure snobbery when he says, "All air travel today involves interrogation, often by someone in a uniform who is your inferior." Ouch. Paul doesn't define what makes someone inferior to him, but I'm guessing it's because they wear an ill-fitting uniform and are paid by the hour. Of such comments revolutions are born. But on with the trip...

Theroux has always excelled at getting under the surface of the lands he's journeyed through, and this outing is no exception. He has a novelist's eye for character and landscape, and, even more importantly for the purposes of a travel writer, an unquenchable curiosity about people and local history. Theroux drills down deep into the South's history and culture, showing how the Civil War and the Jim Crow-era have never truly ended; in fact, if the book has a theme it's that racism is alive and well throughout the South. I shouldn't have been surprised, I suppose, but the extent of the divide between blacks and whites in the South is still somewhat shocking. Theroux's tour of the South takes in many locations that were the scene of infamous examples of white on black violence, and he does an admirable job of bringing these episodes to life. But then he puts his foot in his mouth when he describes being harangued by a black woman for arriving late for an interview. He casts her in the role of professional white-hater, and, what's worse, surmises from her looks that she might not be black at all. What makes this so offensive and dumb is that later in the book Theroux shows that he's aware of the fact that white Southerners regard even a trace of black "blood" as enough to count someone as black. This is, in fact, the theme of Light in August by William Faulkner, an author who Theroux discusses at length in the book. Theroux might not have seen his antagonist as black, but it's almost certain that Southern society does.

Most travel writers who take a spin through Dixie invariably knock off a few thousand words about antebellum mansions, mint juleps, oak tress dripping with Spanish moss, Southern hospitality--all the boilerplate of Southern travel writing. Theroux doesn't have time for that kind of tripe. He shows that the South is primarily a land of grinding poverty, fear of the outside world, and apocalyptic fatalism (and a hell of a lot of fried food). Theroux has great sympathy for the South's poor, but a shaky understanding of the politics and economics behind this poverty. At times he seems to take a the-poor-are-always-with-us tone, as when meets one particularly indigent family and offers a quote from a Chekhov short story called Peasants. The quote describes a woman's sense of realization that peasants are human and can be pitied for their suffering. It's a tone deaf piece of writing by Theroux since it casts him in the role of a patronizing snob--look at me, I feel sorry or these people and here's an example of my erudition to prove it. He correctly points to free trade deals that having hollowed out the South's manufacturing base, as have cheap imports, but he doesn't take the next step and point out that in this regard the South is no different than, well, most every other part of the U.S.

Since 1980 and the election of Ronald Reagan, the corporate and political elite of America have been engaged in an overt and relentless campaign to rollback the relationship between capital and labour to something approximating the period before 1900. In short, business wants workers underpaid and unrepresented by unions, and their political allies want to distract or disenfranchise voters who might want to reverse this process. There's nothing secret about this and dozens of writers have described it at length. The South has more than its fair share of poverty, but that's largely because the region was always well ahead of the rest of the country in the twin sciences of disenfranchisement and union busting.

Theroux is good at micro views of poverty, but the macro escapes him. He fails to see that he's living in a country which is now almost existentially committed to creating wealth at any expense. The fact that he himself has homes in Hawaii and Cape Cod (I'm guessing they're not shotgun shacks) is a testament to the wealth-centric economic policies that create poverty. Theroux bemoans the lack of government assistance for the poor, but doesn't make the link to the low taxation he enjoys which pays for luxury homes. It's a simple equation: less social welfare spending so the upper-middle-classes and above can grow richer thanks to lower taxes. Theroux applauds various non-profit groups and NGOs that try to ameliorate life for the Southern poor, but he fails to see that these are simply band-aids. Without profound changes at the political level these efforts are largely futile.

Theroux takes the Bill Clinton Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the federal government to task for funding anti-poverty projects in Africa and elsewhere when many parts of the South are in just as bad a shape. It's a fair point, but it overlooks two factors. First, to acknowledge that kind of poverty exists in the U.S. is a tacit admission that there is a systemic problem in the way wealth is distributed in America, and no one in the upper levels of American society is willing to cop to that. Second, Theroux's complaint overlooks the fact that racism plays a huge part in the debate around social welfare in the U.S. American culture has always seen poverty as a self-inflicted wound caused by laziness and ignorance, and those are the same qualities ascribed by racists to blacks. In short, a significant number of white Americans have traditionally seen poverty as a black problem caused by the innate moral and intellectual shortcomings of African Americans. Instead of seeing blacks as simply the economic underclass, no different than economic underclasses in other countries, whites have seen a "black problem" rather an economic problem.

The doggedness and sense of empathy Theroux shows in his trip down south is admirable, as is his prose, but his inability to explicate the political and economic causes underlying the South's near-Third World status can be very frustrating. He does, however, get bonus marks from me for rightly praising the works of Charles Portis, a writer who should be famous for more than just True Grit.

Coming Soon To A Country Near You: Cruel Britannia

In one of Paul Theroux's travel books (sorry, I can't remember which) he said that some countries seem perpetually stuck in their own unique time lines: Turkey, for example, always seems twenty years behind the times; the U.S. is always in the here and now; and Britain and Japan are perpetually one week ahead of everyone else. There wasn't anything scientific in Theroux's analysis, just the feeling that in the case of Britain and Japan, the next big things in culture and technology always seem to be coming from those two countries. There's a kernel of truth in this, which is distressing news for the rest of the world if you've paid attention to British politics in the last couple of years.

In Britain, class warfare is the new black, and fashion-conscious right-wing governments and political parties around the world will be taking notice and adjusting their wardrobes accordingly. Britain's coaliton government, led by the Conservatives under David Cameron, has been aggressively pursuing a fiscal austerity agenda, and their most recent budget put the boots to the millions in the U.K. receiving various kinds of social welfare payments, everything from disability benefits to housing allowances, not to mention opening the NHS to privatization. In sum, the working poor, the unemployed and the disabled are being forced to pay for the follies of Britain's banking sector, a tax system that seems to have been designed by and for Russian oligarchs, and a military that still thinks it's guarding an empire. So Cameron's government has been passing out a lot of economic poison pills to what used to be called the working class (when there was work), but what, one wonders, have they done to put a positive spin on this program of impoverishment? Simple: justify it by tacitly claiming that the people being harmed are scum anyway, so what's the problem? They deserve it.

This past week in England a verdict of guilty was brought down against the Philpotts, a loathsome couple who burned down their own house in a bizarre scheme to emerge as heroes after they rescued their six children. All the children died in the fire. The front page of the Daily Mail is the end product of a campaign by right-wing media outlets and politicians to portray people receiving any kind of social assistance as "scroungers", "parasites" and "feral". These people don't "have" children, they, according to the Daily Mail, "breed." Taking his cue from the tabloids, George Osborne, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, wasted no time in inferring that the Philpotts' crimes were somehow a result of social welfare spending. What we have here is no less than class warfare, albeit a war that is completely one-sided. Britain's right-wing papers are to the Conservatives what Fox News is to the Republicans in the U.S., and on behalf of the Conservatives they have been waging a propaganda war against the working class, furiously stoking resentment and fear amongst the middle class, and turning the working poor against those living on the "dole."

Papers like the Sun, Daily Mail and the Telegraph  accomplish this by acting as a media form of Predator drone, keeping a lidless eye focused on Britain's have-nots. Should any member of the underclasses engage in some kind of benefits fraud or enjoy a glitzy "lifestyle" thanks to social welfare payments, the papers authorize a launch of hyper-intensive press coverage that mocks and demonizes both the individual and the welfare state that has supposedly created this monstrous person. The gaudy Philpott case has encouraged the right-wing press and their Conservative pilot fish to come out into the open with their cynical strategy of scapegoating and punishing the underclass in order to enrich the classes above.

This kind of open class warfare hasn't yet made the jump to North America. In the U.S., politicians like to pretend there's no class system, and any attempt to vilify the mostly African-American underclasses runs the risk of being viewed as undiluted racism. What happens instead is that Fox News and the like spend most of their time attacking/smearing those advocating or defending what are perceived as left-wing causes. Here in Canada, the federal Conservative government is waging a relentless propaganda campaign (paid for by the taxpayer) that extolls the benefits of Conservative rule. In their eyes, the underclass is anyone who opposes oil sands development. This is not to say that playing the class warfare card won't happen in either country. Rightists throughout the world increasingly sing from the same hymn book, so if a winning right-wing formula emerges in one part of the world, it's sure to be copied in another.

The interesting question is why the class warfare card is being played now in Britain. The simple answer is that this is the natural next step in the capitalist counter-revolution that began with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. In the decades after WW II most Western governments enacted wide-ranging social welfare policies and looked upon unions with favour, or at least tolerance. The main reason for this, especially in Europe, was fear of communism. Thatcher put an end to all that. Capitalism, flying under the banners of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, was determined to roll back the economic order to a state that pre-dated WW I. Using terms like globalization, rationalization, healthy competition, and meritocracy, rightists presented this counter-revolution as an exercise in scientific, logical management of the world economy. That myth dissolved in the international financial crisis of 2007-08. What to do next? In Britain, it seems the answer is to take the PR filters off and have at the underclasses with all the vitriol the tabloid press can muster. And who can blame them? The upper classes have been searching for a new blood sport ever since the ban on fox hunting in 2002. Tally ho, and see you on the barricades!

Book Review: Crazy River (2011) by Richard Grant

Much like the African river author Richard Grant set out to try and raft the length of, his book about the trip ends up wandering into some dead ends, hits some snags, and comes to an unsuccessful conclusion. But there are some hair-raising adventures along the way and the trip is conducted with enthusiasm and an acute eye for detail.

Grant originally went to Africa to travel the length of the Malagarasi River, something no explorer has ever done. Grant freely admits he was indulging in a childhood fantasy of playing at explorer, and his somewhat successful journey on the river, led and organized by a professional guide with the help of several assistants, makes up the bulk of his story. This part of the book has a variety of scary moments thanks to rapids, hippos and trigger-happy poachers, not to mention the usual agglomeration of snakes, biting bugs, and insufferable heat. There's no doubt this was a dangerous adventure, but, like climbing Himalayan mountains, it's utterly pointless. Grant is putting himself in harm's way purely to satisfy his own ego and to entertain his readership. Grant is fairly candid about admitting his base motives for the river trip, but there's something monstrously selfish about this kind of life-threatening adventuring that I find off-putting. When Grant risks his life he's also putting the emotional lives of his loved ones at risk. Does he ever think how horrible his death would be for his parents? girlfriend? siblings? Is risking their grief worth the ephemeral and pointless honour of traveling an unknown river? Another thing that bothers me about it is that this kind of adventure is almost the ultimate expression of Western wealth and decadence. The people Grant meets in East Africa are constantly fighting and struggling to the limits of endurance to improve their lives, or even just to stay alive. And here comes Grant spewing thousands of dollars in an attempt, as it were, to lose his life. I don't think Grant appreciates the irony of his quest, and it mars his book. And the book's epilogue leaves a very bad taste. You might expect Grant would add some updates about the people he met on his trip. Nope. Instead we get a cliche moan about how difficult it was to adjust to life in the affluent US of A after months in poorest Africa. Duh. This is tired, boilerplate travel writing and it's surprising an editor didn't give Grant a nudge about it.

The rest of the book is a rambling tour through Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam, rural Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda. Grant was careful to avoid Western comforts and accommodation on his trip and it pays off. We get a worm's eye view of the trials and tribulations of daily life in East Africa, and it's not a pretty picture. What Grant shows us is a region that is crumbling under the hammer blows of overpopulation, corruption, diminishing resources, and national economies that have been grossly deformed by foreign aid. This is all interesting and important information, but it has to be said that other writers and journalists have beaten Grant to the punch in the last decade, most notably Paul Theroux in Dark Star Safari and The Road to Hell by Michael Maren. Both books cover virtually the same ground and issues as Crazy River, and they do a better job of it. Having somewhat slagged Crazy River, it's only fair to mention that Grant's book about Mexico, God's Middle Finger, has to rate as one of the best travel books I've ever read. He was exposed to even more danger there, but it wasn't anything that he was expecting, and what he reveals about a little known corner of Mexico (the Sierra Madres) is fascinating. If you want to get a better understanding of why the Mexican drug cartels are so brutally strong, read this book.

Book Review: Wild Coast: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge (2011) by John Gimlette

There are really only two kinds of travel books. The first is what could be called the travel autobiography, in which the author restricts his writing largely to what he saw, felt and heard during his travels. In these travel books there's usually only the most cursory mention of local history, customs, and flora and fauna. Paul Theroux is the king of this sub-genre. The other kind of travel book is what I'd call cut-and-paste travel writing. We get some firsthand experiences in these books, but we also get a lot of potted history and biography, all of it lifted from other sources. This pads the book out to a publishable length and makes the author look quite the scholar. I hate this kind of book. If I want to read the history of, say, Turkey I'll read a dedicated history of that country. When I read a travel book I want a story about travel: it's dangers, pleasures, frustrations and the subtle changes it makes to our character and the way we see other people. I don't want this:

"Over the centuries the island of Sicily has been occupied, raided or invaded by a host of warrior races and nations, and each has left its mark on Sicily's landscape, culture, architecture, and, yes, even it's cuisine. A very partial list of Sicily's various conquerors would include Phoenicians, Vikings, Franks, Turks, Barbary pirates, Venetians, and the Green Bay Packers."

You see? Until I mentioned the Packers you thought that was an actual piece of cut-and-paste travel writing. That's how easy it is to churn out that kind of travel writing; simply crib some info from Wikipedia, add in an anecdote or two about a bad bus ride or a spell of dysentery and you're good to go.

And so, in a roundabout way, we get to Wild Coast, which turns out to be a very good combination of the two kinds of travel writing. Gimlette takes us on a tour of Guyana, Surinam (formerly Dutch Guiana) and French Guiana, three neighbours tucked into the northeast corner of South America. He doesn't stint on the historical and biographical elements, which would normally annoy me, but these three countries (actually two countries and one department of France) have taken their respective histories from the bin labelled Bizarre & Bloody. All three places are the end products of slavery, plantation economies, rebellions and bad government, and today are mostly undeveloped and unknown.

One of the more interesting things to come out this book is the fact that racism comes in all colours in this region. The peoples of the Guianas are made up of blacks, Ameridians, East Indians, whites, and some Asians. The various racial groups regard each other with either suspicion or hatred, and within the black community the lighter-skinned look down their noses at the darker-skinned. It's all rather depressing, but it's clear this situation has its roots in the savage plantation economy of the past. The various racial groups were either brutalized or put in competiton with each other, and the toxic results are societies that seethe with resentment and distrust.

Gimlette is a good traveling companion. He doesn't shy away from taking the road less travelled because it's dangerous, dirty and smelly, and his writing style is breezy, rich with metaphors and always entertaining. The only knock against him is that he seems to get along with everyone he encounters. This is very polite of him, but not very believable. I prefer Paul Theroux's thornier personality in this regard. Gimlette's cheeriness aside, this is one of the better travel books I've read in a long time.