William Dalrymple on the future on travel writing in the shrinking, globalizing world of the Internet age:
Today, however, many of the most interesting travel books are by individuals who have made extended stays in places, getting to know them intimately: such as Iain Sinclair's circling of the capital in London Orbital or Sam Miller's Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity. There is also Ghosh in his Egyptian village, published as In an Antique Land, or Christopher de Bellaigue's magnificent recent study, Rebel Land, which examines the way that the ghosts of the Armenian genocide and Kurdish nationalism haunt a single remote town in eastern Turkey. As Mishra puts it, in a more globalised, postcolonial world the traveller "needs to train his eye in the way an ethnographer does . . . to remain relevant and stimulating, travel writing has to take on board some of the sophisticated knowledge available about these complex societies, about their religions, history, economy, and politics."
The last world should go to Thubron, the most revered of all the travel writers of the 80s still at work. He is also clear that travel writing is now more needed than ever: "Great swaths of the world are hardly visited and remain much misunderstood - think of Iran," he told me recently. "It's no accident that the mess inflicted on the world by the last US administration was done by a group of men who had hardly travelled, and relied for information on policy documents and the reports of journalists sitting interviewing middle-class contacts in capital cities. A good travel writer can give you the warp and weft of everyday life, the generalities of people's existence that are rarely reflected in journalism, and hardly touched on by any other discipline. Despite the internet and the revolution in communications, there is still no substitute."
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