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Once divided up between the British, the Dutch and the French (and with extensive communities of African and Asian origin), Guiana is cut off from the rest of South America not just by language but also by what Gimlette calls ‘one of the oldest, thickest, darkest and least inhabited forests of the world’. Both V. S. and Shiva Naipaul have written compellingly about it, though the most famous account of a journey through its midst was by Evelyn Waugh, the most unlikely and unsuitable of intrepid travellers. Waugh’s hilarious 92 Days is not exactly a eulogy of the land but rather a protracted moan directed at almost everyone he meets, including the indigenous inhabitants, whom he criticises for ‘their stupidity and lack of imagination’.
Many other travellers have been similarly unappreciative of Guiana, which was characterised by an English yachtsman of 1882 as ‘a hopeless land of slime and fever’. And the image of the place has barely been helped by its atrocious history of slavery and civil wars, by its having been the scene of the appalling Jonestown massacre, and through harbouring the notorious French penal colony known tellingly as Devil’s Island.
Gimlette, the very opposite sort of traveller to Waugh (and to such later curmudgeonly South American commentators as Isherwood and Theroux) is, refreshingly, an unfailing enthusiast. Capable of calling the former Dutch Guiana (Suriname) ‘one of the most enchanting, enchanted countries I’d ever known’, he seems also to be drawn by the disastrous, to the extent of following in the footsteps of his distant 16th-century ancestor Robert Hayman, an especially ill-fated explorer last seen disappearing up rapids with ‘no map, no medicine, and no prospect of rescue’. Clearly there is a streak of the perverse in Gimlette. Referring to a hotel where, in the space of a few days, ‘a planeful of food got lost, a fridge exploded, the heavens burst open, and there was a festival of toads’, he writes that he ‘loved it, and would happily have stayed for weeks.’
Wild Coast is driven by extraordinary dedication, an insatiable curiosity in everything, and an enormous empathy for other people. Gimlette’s descriptions of landscapes are often hauntingly beautiful, his sense of humour is engagingly dead-pan (‘Nothing spoils a good lunch quite like the threat of a hand-grenade attack’), and he makes the Dutch colonial town of Paramaribo (of which few people have probably heard) sound like one of the world’s most charming cities. His book is also characterised by a thoroughness of research that puts most travel writers to shame. How many of them come away from their travels with an accumulation of ‘over 3,000 pages of notes, ten hours of taped interviews, and 1,000 photos’?
In lesser hands, such richness of texture and abundance of learning might have led to indigestion on the reader’s part. But Gimlette manages to steer through all the material with a great lightness of touch, skilfully weaving the personal narrative into a lucid and lively account of a multi-cultural history that even includes a remote and barely surviving community of Burmese immigrants (searched out by Gimlette with characteristic thoroughness).
Particularly memorable are his incisive portraits of the many crazed, tragic and eccentric figures associated with these lands, from the El Dorado-searching Walter Raleigh to the psychopathic Reverend Jones, from the convict Papillon (here portrayed as an irresponsible fantasist) to the obscure Victorian naturalist Charles Waterton, who ended up creating a mini-Guiana in the heart of Georgia.
All in all, Wild Coast is a reminder not just of the magnificent and endless strangeness of South America, but also of the way in which travel literature can still fulfil its role of bringing to life some of the world’s unjustly neglected corners.
Because you read about book reviews
Also by Michael Jacobs
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