Friday, May 29, 2009

Dark Star Safari

Dark Star Safari is a travel book, but it is not a holiday book. Theroux decided to go from Cairo to Cape Town using anything other than airplanes (though he does end up having to take one plane), and he portrays himself as a crotchety old man who has no time for traditional tourists, photography, sightseeing, and luxury. His method reminds me a little bit of Kerouac: traveling without a specific purpose, just observing normal lives and making spur-of-the-moment decisions to adventure into unexpected places. And like Kerouac his view is not a grand vision of the continent but a series of miniature portraits of individuals and towns.

Theroux references Heart of Darkness several times, particularly when he is traveling by boat along the Nile, and his view of the state of Africa is not much better than that in Conrad's story. Most of the countries Theroux travels through have thrown off their colonial Kurtzes only to have them replaced by local despots, tyrants and corrupt governments. Where there is copious foreign aid we are repeatedly shown the image of men standing around underneath trees with nothing to do, waiting for their foreign benefits. Where there is little aid people rely on subsistence farming, one bad season from famine. In Zimbabwe (as it was in 2001) Theroux describes a country on the edge of the abyss, about to go from a reasonably peaceful, prosperous country with modern farms and services to a lawless disaster ruled by a madman. "Even the democratic" South Africa sounds terrifying, with insane rates of seemingly unstoppable crime and plenty of racism.

For the first quarter or so of the book I found Theroux's mocking of the aid agencies and their expensive Land Rovers a bit tiresome, but by the time he's described the horrors of genital mutilation, poverty, AIDS denialism, useless government officials in expensive suits and on and on I pretty much agreed with his extreme cynicism, although this cynicism is uncomfortably close to saying "not our problem, too hard, nothing works".

It seems silly to say that I "enjoyed" such a depressing book, but it was worthwhile reading and Theroux's account was fundamentally honest and truthful despite his grumpy old man persona. The standard Western liberal view is that Africa is gradually getting better, and we just need to give a bit more to speed up the process. Dark Star Safari challenges everything about this view: In many places it's getting worse, "better" to us isn't necessarily better to them, aid is often counterproductive...it's all so depressing.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

A Fine Romance

A quick perusal of Wikipedia reveals that Jane Eyre inspired a huge number of adaptations in film, music and television form throughout the 20th century, involving such names as Hitchcock, Welles, and Huxley. I would suggest that this is due to the timeless structure of the plot and its miraculous convergence with the narrator's own thoughts about romance and purposeful life. Film pitch: independent woman is down for some reason or other, meets some guy who is totally not her type, God, goes off and does something else, gets the guy in the end once he's renounced his fault(s) in her eyes. I don't know how common it was to have a female first-person narrator in the mold of Jane Eyre in the 19th century, but in its favour Jane Eyre does at least pass the DTWOF test.

Jane certainly wouldn't warrant a profile in Ms., but she is a perfect match for what I would call "post-feminism", which in its extremest form is roughly "that set of views in which a woman who dresses tarty, gets smashed, and sleeps around is the really free feminist". To transpose to the context of Jane Eyre: Jane is a free woman, free to choose the life of a dutiful wife with the perfect man, but not until he's really proven himself and she has proven that she could have got on without him.

But enough of this more-feminist-than-thou mockery. Jane Eyre is a great read, well-paced and well-written (apart from the occasional spell of overwritten dialogue) with a classic plot that ends well for all the characters Bronte has you sympathise with. Remove the Christian moralizing and the weird demon wife and you've pretty much got the blueprint for a modern romantic film script. I'd like to conclude by quoting my favourite passage from Jane Eyre:

"Are you well?" she asked. Well might she put the question: his face was blanched as her gown.

"Quite well," he enunciated; and, with a bow, he left the gate. She went one way; he another. She turned twice to gaze after him as she tripped fairy-like down the field; he, as he strode firmly across, never turned at all.

Ahh, unrequited love...