Harrowing Passages

The six books under review here relate to travel or exploration or to both. Recent publications, they fall into several genres—and in certain instances into several at once: biography, history, travelogue, travel essay, and fiction. Collectively they span the globe from Canada’s far north to South America’s southernmost tip, from Moscow to Mato Grosso, or, as the title of one of them reads, From China to Peru, and points elsewhere and in between. The five authors are a retired English professor, a naval historian, a novelist best known for his science fiction, and two journalists who have also written fiction, one specializing in “sailing and marine matters,” and the other a staff writer for the New Yorker. Without indexing them further or groping after generalities that will somehow embrace and connect them all, I will simply take the books as they came my way.

I begin with Russell Fraser, a retired English professor and longtime contributor to these pages, who has recently published two books of travel writing. The first, The Three Romes: Moscow, Constantinople, and Rome, is a reprint. In 1985, when the book appeared, the cities of its title, especially Moscow, were very different places than now; and the publisher was Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, not Transaction. In a lengthy introduction to the new edition Fraser casts a backward glance on the project, shedding valuable light on the book’s origins and aims. The second of his two books, From China to Peru: A Memoir of Travel, published in 2009 by the University of South Carolina Press, brings together twelve travel essays, most of which appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review.

The Three Romes—a book with “intention,” which is Fraser’s word but which reflects the publisher William Jovanovich’s wishes—is much the better of the two and is well worth reprinting. Fraser’s intention (given below) entailed deep research into the histories of the cities in conjunction with his firsthand experience, and for this reason the book is more durable than some travel books. Simply put, the book has an argument to make. All but the very best travel books are destined to fade with the passage of time, but Fraser’s book has a spark of staying power, and this despite the demise of the Soviet Union, Fraser’s bugbear and the subject of some of his best writing.

By comparison From China to Peru: A Memoir of Travel is uneven—perhaps a facile criticism to make since essay collections are by nature uneven. Here, however, Fraser’s limitations as a travel writer are too much in view, while in The Three Romes they remain safely offstage. I won’t dwell on these limitations—only to note that persona counts and that it counts enormously in the traditional line of travel writing to which Fraser belongs, and that Fraser has not created a winning persona. Fraser is at his best in From China to Peru in those essays in which he recounts history, as for example the Battle of Culloden, in one of the collection’s most successful essays, or the exploits of Peter the Great in the essay on St. Petersburg. He is generally not at his...