|
Guest
|
TITLE: The Travels of Ibn Battutah
AUTHOR: Ed. Tim Mackintosh Smith
PUBLISHER: Picador. (Aug. 2003)
ISBN: 0 330 41879 3 PRICE: A$ 25.00 (paperback) 325 pages
Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com)
This is a book to read and savour slowly. Ibn Battutah, set off on his travels
from Tangier in 1303, at the age of twenty-one. He was as full of curiosity and
as attracted by novel situations and characters as any modern travel-writer,
and perhaps he had a witty and ironical turn of phrase which kept those who
later listened to his travel stories enthralled. So, as tales about his
far-flung adventures spread, the Sultan of Morocco commissioned a young writer
to take down Ibn Battutah's "memoirs": "I took down from him the names of
famous people he had met, and we profited greatly from him", wrote this young
man.
No doubt dictated memoirs are rather more formal than travellers tales told to
a circle of friends in a garden. In any case, the style of speech and writing
in Morocco was more formal in the fourteenth-century. Ibn Battutah's memoirs,
then, amazing and varied as they are, do not have the jokey, caricaturing,
deliberately reader-friendly sort of style that modern readers of travel-book
might expect.
Below the title on the book's cover is a quote from the Guardian which suggests
that it offers "A picture of medieval civilization without equal in detail and
brilliance". This is true, and the picture is often fascinating, but (for me)
the length of the book was also one of its problems. At times it reads like a
name-dropper's long list of famous people met; or an extensive travel
itinerary; and it is still a long and comprehensive account of the travels,
even though Tim Mackintosh Smith has taken his knife to it. I was much more at
home with Tim Mackintosh Smith's brief, easy-going, humorous style than I was
with Ibn Battutah's.
Nevertheless, the mixture of anecdotes, fact, magical stories, poetry and
personal detail and opinion in this book has a definite charm. And there are
some thought-provoking accounts of easy travel amongst people whose differing
religious beliefs, now, are a major cause of conflict. The picture of the
medieval world, too, is sometimes a picture of places which still exist almost
unchanged since Ibn Battutah saw them, at other times he describes things which
have since vanished due to disasters of various kinds, but mostly due to war.
Battutah, as one blurb says, 'dined with sultans, khans and emperors, escaped
from pirates, sired children on several continents: crossed deserts; dodged the
Black Death"; and he travelled by every form of transport then available. Like
any modern traveller he feared for his safety on some journeys, ate unfamiliar
and sometimes vile-tasting food, and suffered the resulting diarrhoea: some
things never change.
For serious readers and writers of travel books, this book is a classic - a
book to keep on your shelf and dip into whenever your get itchy feet and the
urge for fresh adventures.
*******************************************************************************
**
Copyright © Ann Skea 2003
http://ann.skea.com
Ted Hughes' Pages http://ann.skea.com/THHome
Ted Hughes: Poetry and Magic: 'The Path of The Tower' now online. |
|
|
