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warrenl's review against another edition
3.0
I can't truthfully say I enjoyed this book, despite my love of Graham Greene. Being Greene, the writing soars at times, but for the most part I struggled with the tedium, which may simply reflect the tedium of the journey itself. Clearly Greene himself struggles with it. He makes vague claims about casting off civilised sophistication and searching for the primitive self, but I do struggle with his motivations for undertaking such a miserable trek. Hundreds of miles of monotonous jungle, village after festering village, will-sapping heat, mosquitos, jiggers, an endless fight to keep the hired native carriers in line, and the ever-present risk of running out of whiskey. Perhaps it all seemed like a good idea at the time? I remember once thinking the same thing about a holiday on the Gold Coast...
For reasons known only to Greene, he chooses to dispense of the female cousin who accompanied him with just the occasional mention, and in the end we know next to nothing of her, or her journey. And it's hard to not notice Greene's fascination with black breasts. One wonders whether he was aware of it as he wrote, or whether it infected the manuscript in cod-Freudian fashion. Perhaps it was simply the novelty of exposed boobs? They weren't common in post-Victorian England, as we all know.
Anyway, by the time Greene made the beach at Monrovia, I was only too glad to climb into the surf boat with him and board the steamer that whisked us away from 1930s Liberia. He'd had enough. So had I.
For reasons known only to Greene, he chooses to dispense of the female cousin who accompanied him with just the occasional mention, and in the end we know next to nothing of her, or her journey. And it's hard to not notice Greene's fascination with black breasts. One wonders whether he was aware of it as he wrote, or whether it infected the manuscript in cod-Freudian fashion. Perhaps it was simply the novelty of exposed boobs? They weren't common in post-Victorian England, as we all know.
Anyway, by the time Greene made the beach at Monrovia, I was only too glad to climb into the surf boat with him and board the steamer that whisked us away from 1930s Liberia. He'd had enough. So had I.
andrew_j_r's review against another edition
2.0
I read this book simple because I had just read the Tim Butcher book, Chasing the Devil in which Butcher decides to retread the steps of Graham Greene, as told in this book.
I should have learned. When I read Butcher's first book, I similarly attempted the book of the journey that he tried to follow in that volume as well, and gave up because of the way that Stanley came across. Indeed, in this book it is quite difficult to think that this only happened seventy five or so years ago. Both the land that Greene is visiting, and the land that he comes from, seem awfully alien, so it was hard to get into his head.
His cousin also completes the journey with him, but she barely gets a mention, and in fact often you will forget that she is his travelling companion until there is another throwaway reference.
Greene is fixated on the breasts of the young brown girls. Every pair is described in intimate detail, from the shape, colour, darkness and size of the nipples etcetera, and by the end of the book he just comes across as a dodgy character with a tit fixation. Certainly all of the descriptions help little to enlighten you about the world around him, and tell you more about the way his mind works.
I really wanted to enjoy this, but sadly I could not. The devils were interesting, as they were in the Tim Butcher book, but when Greene finally gets to talk to someone who knows a lot about the subject, he confesses that he was tired and did not note down much of the conversation, which he could subsequently recall little of. Oh well.
It took me ages to read - not because it is a large book, but because it did not keep my interest. I did manage to complete it after picking at it for several weeks, which felt like a bit of an achievement to be honest, but I won't be rushing about to read more Graham Greene any time soon!
I should have learned. When I read Butcher's first book, I similarly attempted the book of the journey that he tried to follow in that volume as well, and gave up because of the way that Stanley came across. Indeed, in this book it is quite difficult to think that this only happened seventy five or so years ago. Both the land that Greene is visiting, and the land that he comes from, seem awfully alien, so it was hard to get into his head.
His cousin also completes the journey with him, but she barely gets a mention, and in fact often you will forget that she is his travelling companion until there is another throwaway reference.
Greene is fixated on the breasts of the young brown girls. Every pair is described in intimate detail, from the shape, colour, darkness and size of the nipples etcetera, and by the end of the book he just comes across as a dodgy character with a tit fixation. Certainly all of the descriptions help little to enlighten you about the world around him, and tell you more about the way his mind works.
I really wanted to enjoy this, but sadly I could not. The devils were interesting, as they were in the Tim Butcher book, but when Greene finally gets to talk to someone who knows a lot about the subject, he confesses that he was tired and did not note down much of the conversation, which he could subsequently recall little of. Oh well.
It took me ages to read - not because it is a large book, but because it did not keep my interest. I did manage to complete it after picking at it for several weeks, which felt like a bit of an achievement to be honest, but I won't be rushing about to read more Graham Greene any time soon!
millie_blue's review against another edition
adventurous
slow-paced
3.75
Content Warnings
Moderate: Racism and Racial slurs
Minor: Colonisation
trailofmonkeys's review against another edition
3.0
Decent travelogue but really hard to get past how it's dated.
nickfourtimes's review against another edition
3.0
1) ''We, like Wordsworth, are living after a war and a revolution, and these half-castes fighting with bombs between the cliffs of skyscrapers seem more likely than we to be aware of Proteus rising from the sea. It is not, of course, that one wishes to stay forever at that level, but when one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction centuries of cerebration have brought us, one sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray.''
2) ''The method of psychoanalysis is to bring the patient back to the idea which he is repressing: a long journey backwards without maps, catching a clue here and a clue there, as I caught the names of villages from this man and that, until one has to face the general idea, the pain or the memory. This is what you have feared, Africa can be imagined as saying, you can't avoid it, there it is creeping round the wall, flying in at the door, rustling the grass, you can't turn your back, you can't forget it, so you may as well take a long look.''
3) ''I thought of Vande in the dark urging the carriers over the long gaping swaying bridge at Duogobmai; I remembered they had never had the goat to guard them from the elephants. It wouldn't have been any use now. We were all of us back in the hands of adolescence, and I thought rebelliously: I am glad, for here is iced beer and a wireless set which will pick up the Empire programme from Daventry, and after all it is home, in the sense that we have been taught to know home, where we will soon forget the finer taste, the finer pleasure, the finer terror on which we might have built.''
2) ''The method of psychoanalysis is to bring the patient back to the idea which he is repressing: a long journey backwards without maps, catching a clue here and a clue there, as I caught the names of villages from this man and that, until one has to face the general idea, the pain or the memory. This is what you have feared, Africa can be imagined as saying, you can't avoid it, there it is creeping round the wall, flying in at the door, rustling the grass, you can't turn your back, you can't forget it, so you may as well take a long look.''
3) ''I thought of Vande in the dark urging the carriers over the long gaping swaying bridge at Duogobmai; I remembered they had never had the goat to guard them from the elephants. It wouldn't have been any use now. We were all of us back in the hands of adolescence, and I thought rebelliously: I am glad, for here is iced beer and a wireless set which will pick up the Empire programme from Daventry, and after all it is home, in the sense that we have been taught to know home, where we will soon forget the finer taste, the finer pleasure, the finer terror on which we might have built.''
corrompido's review against another edition
3.0
This was an interesting book, although ultimately it did not transport me away. Following an early trip by Greene through Liberia it was mostly an interesting and candid look at colonialisms last few years. However the fact that it was less a story and almost a diary of random thoughts made it hard for me to every really get into the rhythm of the story.
krisz's review against another edition
5.0
The book is fascinating and I didn't mind that Greene didn't go "alone" or he didn't always take notes. This book is a gem, and I truly enjoyed reading first hand experience!
manwithanagenda's review against another edition
adventurous
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
In 1935 Graham Greene decided to take what spare money he had and walk through the interior of Liberia and Sierra Leone, country as yet unmapped, and which the United States had provacatively labeled "cannibals". Along for the trip was his younger cousin Barbara*, who unfortunately has little presence in the narrative. Her own account, 'Land Benighted' (from the Liberian national anthem), was last republished in 1991 as 'Too Late to Turn Back' and is hard to find at a decent price.
After a brief trip from Liverpool to Freetown, Graham hires a cook and other servants, hammock carriers (most whites could only travel in the climate that way apparently), and porters, and sets off, his only aim to walk to Grand Bassa and avoid the route reccomended by the Liberian government. The book is engaging from the first, but it does take awhile to get truly drawn into the narrative.
Greene is not an imperialist, he denounces the corruption and degradation that Westerners have brought to the native people he sees, but he is guilty of the 'noble savage' conceit, and though he doesn't think Westerners should be there, he doesn't think Africans can govern themselves either, at least not in the way the rest of the world does. He's also a breast man. Really fixates on them. Still, one can tell he has a lot of respect for those "pure" aspects of Africa he encounters away from the corrupting influence of the coast and outside world. His scepticism and curiousity and disgust (few Africans were described without open sores) barely mask outright awe and fear at the world he glimpses.
The way the book is written, Greene's timeline gets a little fuzzy and he admits that his incessant drinking and bouts of illness prevented proper note-taking, so I am not surprised at all by the charges of inaccuracies. The book is still beautifully written and expressed, even if Greene makes the journey and Africa all about himself and his devils (or angels, if you will). I want more than ever to read Barbara's account, a young intelligent woman by herself (Graham almost always was hours ahead of her on the trails) with the men her cousin hired and presumably sober, would have a dramatically different (and possibly more interesting) experience. I'd also like to see the photographs.
*A very interesting piece about Barbara from The Telegraph (UK).
After a brief trip from Liverpool to Freetown, Graham hires a cook and other servants, hammock carriers (most whites could only travel in the climate that way apparently), and porters, and sets off, his only aim to walk to Grand Bassa and avoid the route reccomended by the Liberian government. The book is engaging from the first, but it does take awhile to get truly drawn into the narrative.
Greene is not an imperialist, he denounces the corruption and degradation that Westerners have brought to the native people he sees, but he is guilty of the 'noble savage' conceit, and though he doesn't think Westerners should be there, he doesn't think Africans can govern themselves either, at least not in the way the rest of the world does. He's also a breast man. Really fixates on them. Still, one can tell he has a lot of respect for those "pure" aspects of Africa he encounters away from the corrupting influence of the coast and outside world. His scepticism and curiousity and disgust (few Africans were described without open sores) barely mask outright awe and fear at the world he glimpses.
The way the book is written, Greene's timeline gets a little fuzzy and he admits that his incessant drinking and bouts of illness prevented proper note-taking, so I am not surprised at all by the charges of inaccuracies. The book is still beautifully written and expressed, even if Greene makes the journey and Africa all about himself and his devils (or angels, if you will). I want more than ever to read Barbara's account, a young intelligent woman by herself (Graham almost always was hours ahead of her on the trails) with the men her cousin hired and presumably sober, would have a dramatically different (and possibly more interesting) experience. I'd also like to see the photographs.
*A very interesting piece about Barbara from The Telegraph (UK).