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A review by lindamooreauthor
Chasing the Devil: The Search for Africa's Fighting Spirit by Tim Butcher
5.0
Tim Butcher contributes to the renaissance of travel narratives that emulate stories of 19th and 20th century adventurers who set off into remote regions, reporting their tales back to members of British clubs, societies and newspapers that sponsored the trips. Butcher's travelogues follow the footsteps of these writers and remind readers why those expeditions endure in history and in our imaginations. His Blood River, as fine a page-turner as any fiction thriller, interweaves Butcher's own struggle to survive an ambitious trek on the Congo River duplicating Henry Stanley's mission to trace the river's course to the Atlantic.
Chasing the Devil, Butcher's latest book, takes the reader to Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea framing his journey around the trip British writer Graham Greene and his cousin Barbara took in 1935,in order to understand Liberia's freed American slaves and their descendants who became slave holders. Greene recorded his travels in the book Journey Without Maps and Butcher uses Journey as the template for his itinerary.
Butcher's works stand apart from others, mostly biographers, who write about these authors and their travels. He treks, stumbles, struggles through the same remote places and ponders the meaning of it all, as his role model authors did on their own expeditions. The duality of the original journey and Butcher's trip establishes multiple layers of complications and conflict. Quotes from Greene's account contrasted with Chasing the Devil's insightful observations of contemporary reality compel the arm-chair traveler so sure-handedly one might expect to arise from the chair with blisters on his feet.
If character drives narrative, Butcher provides us with a cast of characters to push his non-fiction travelogue into a story arc with all the components of a hero's journey. His young companion David struggles to find himself post-Oxford when the expedition tests him. Johnson, the African guide to places he has never been, steers the troupe away from dangers like the mysterious Poro ceremonies and explains to perplexed tribal peoples the `why' of these white men's trek. Mr. Umaru, the taciturn, motorbike porter of the expedition's supplies, provides no first name but offers wisdom that comes from the clarity of his own goals. Each contributes and reflects back a depth of understanding of the narrative's hero, who is Butcher himself confronting the stages Joseph Campbell describes in his classic, The Hero's Journey. Butcher steps into the unknown, crosses the threshold into unmapped Liberia, where the Journey Without Maps becomes the map and faces tests and ordeals to advance the story until the group returns to the familiar, transformed by their experiences.
The prize Butcher seeks--to understand the reality of these countries from multiple dimensions and gain a perspective beyond "oversimplifying a complex situation," his journalistic writings often required of him--may seem modest. Readers who journey with him find their reward in the details and insights. Butcher cannot resolve, as a fictional hero might, all the challenges of his quest, but he awakens a subtle expectation that others, perhaps some of us, will continue this journey for knowledge and understanding of distant places that challenge the Western-imposed notion of nation state.
Chasing the Devil, Butcher's latest book, takes the reader to Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea framing his journey around the trip British writer Graham Greene and his cousin Barbara took in 1935,in order to understand Liberia's freed American slaves and their descendants who became slave holders. Greene recorded his travels in the book Journey Without Maps and Butcher uses Journey as the template for his itinerary.
Butcher's works stand apart from others, mostly biographers, who write about these authors and their travels. He treks, stumbles, struggles through the same remote places and ponders the meaning of it all, as his role model authors did on their own expeditions. The duality of the original journey and Butcher's trip establishes multiple layers of complications and conflict. Quotes from Greene's account contrasted with Chasing the Devil's insightful observations of contemporary reality compel the arm-chair traveler so sure-handedly one might expect to arise from the chair with blisters on his feet.
If character drives narrative, Butcher provides us with a cast of characters to push his non-fiction travelogue into a story arc with all the components of a hero's journey. His young companion David struggles to find himself post-Oxford when the expedition tests him. Johnson, the African guide to places he has never been, steers the troupe away from dangers like the mysterious Poro ceremonies and explains to perplexed tribal peoples the `why' of these white men's trek. Mr. Umaru, the taciturn, motorbike porter of the expedition's supplies, provides no first name but offers wisdom that comes from the clarity of his own goals. Each contributes and reflects back a depth of understanding of the narrative's hero, who is Butcher himself confronting the stages Joseph Campbell describes in his classic, The Hero's Journey. Butcher steps into the unknown, crosses the threshold into unmapped Liberia, where the Journey Without Maps becomes the map and faces tests and ordeals to advance the story until the group returns to the familiar, transformed by their experiences.
The prize Butcher seeks--to understand the reality of these countries from multiple dimensions and gain a perspective beyond "oversimplifying a complex situation," his journalistic writings often required of him--may seem modest. Readers who journey with him find their reward in the details and insights. Butcher cannot resolve, as a fictional hero might, all the challenges of his quest, but he awakens a subtle expectation that others, perhaps some of us, will continue this journey for knowledge and understanding of distant places that challenge the Western-imposed notion of nation state.