I was a tiny bit dubious about this book, simply because the author goes by the name Jules. If you were at school with me, you can probably hear the same allegedly “slimy but satisfying” voice that I hear, declaiming, “Hi, I’m Jules!”. I say this as a person who could go by Jules but has never quite managed – I’ve had a bit of a go at Jem but that never really stuck either. It came as no surprise to discover, in the very first chapter, the sentence “I don’t often advertise it, but I have a history degree from a world-renowned British university. Dreaming spires, Inspector Morse, all that”. Last month’s, Alistair Humphreys of Ask An Adventurer is as well. Imagine my dismay to discover that next month’s is too! Three Oxford boys in a row! That puts a slightly different complexion on a few things I have to say about this book. I need to make a more conscious effort to find travel books by women and by men who didn’t go off to Oxford.
Anyway. I was looking for a travel book and since we were still at the tail end of this year’s heatwave at the time, Not Cool jumped out. In short, it’s one man taking the train between nine European cities in nine days. Because I keep forgetting, let’s list them. He starts in Berlin, goes to Prague, Vienna, Bratislava, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Zurich via Vaduz and then takes the Bernina Express to Milan. It’s a whistle-stop tour, with the cities mostly represented by a paragraph or two of infodump, a visit to a place of food and beer and usually a quick stop at somewhere tourists don’t usually go. This isn’t a book that’s going to give you a deep dive into nine European cities. In Zagred, for example, Brown gives us more about washing socks in a cheap hotel than he does about the city. That’s not a criticism. The point of this isn’t really the nine cities. It’s all about the travel, the train trips between the nine cities. But it’s also a reflection on the nature of being a travel writer – about the fine line that sometimes becomes utterly non-existent between “work” and “holiday”. As a long-time travel writer, for Rough Guides among other things, he’s accustomed to becoming the leading authority on a destination in less time than the average tourist spends touristing there, checking out as many restaurants as one human can fit into a few days and scribbling down train timetables.
This book is set during a heatwave in, I think, 2019 (although now I’m hunting back through the book, I can’t see a date, only that it’s pre-plague and pre-Brexit). Maybe it was 2018. I don’t remember much heatwave in 2019 but I do remember driving back from the airport after a trip to Iceland in 2018 and being too hot and sticky and near-dead to get out of the car once I got home. Anyway, that’s irrelevant. It was a summer before the world turned to – well, what it’s turned to in recent years – and it was hot. The heat does come up, of course it does, it’s in the title, but it doesn’t feel as hot throughout this book as it probably would if I wrote it. Yeah, there’s complaints about air conditioning and the window that doesn’t let in enough cool air in Berlin but I think I’d expect the entire book to feel weighed down by the uncomfortable and overwhelming heat and it just doesn’t. Not a criticism either but I kind of wonder what hook you’d have for this book if you took out the element of “… in a heatwave!”.
But for me, this book isn’t actually about the travel either. What I took from this book is that you don’t have to go off and have a big adventure to get a book out of it. At the time of writing, over a month before publishing, I’ve just sent off the third draft of my Iceland book for another round of red-penning and so naturally, I’m starting to think about what to write next. My instinct is to say that I don’t have enough material from anywhere to make a whole book and maybe it’ll have to be the non-fiction equivalent of a short story collection. But now I realise that if you can turn nine days of spending maybe two hours in each of nine cities into a book, I can probably write a dozen books right now and if I can’t, I can take ten days off work for a small adventure next year (used up all my holiday allowance for this year).
It’s the bits about being a travel writer that I devoured most hungrily – about how that affects how you travel and how you think. Not only that you’re always taking notes, even on holiday, in case they’re useful later. It’s the reflections on how you can become the leading authority on a place in a ludicrously short amount of time. It’s this quote which I highlighted (I read it on Kindle; no pens were applied to actual pages):
Every journey I made, every place I visited, added a layer to the person I slowly became; and in time, the layers added up to a travel writer. An experience here, a bit of language there, some cultural knowledge, an appreciation of difference, an embrace of new things – these are the layers that the world can give you.
I don’t necessarily subscribe to the popular quote “The world is a book and those who don’t travel only read one page” but I think there is a difference in outlook between people who regularly spend time in other places and cultures and people who don’t. How many travel writers, photographers and professional goers-on-holiday put a tick in that other box back in 2016? I’ve had and done those things he lists, especially the languages, which is the bit travel bloggers in particular seem to gloss over – that’s an Anglophone thing in general.
I’m a big fan of learning languages and a great believer that having an idea of how the language works gives you an idea of how a place works. For example: Finnish only has one third-person singular pronoun and doesn’t use grammatical gender. “Hän” can mean “he” or “she” depending on context – it’s neither a neologism nor a different pronoun repurposed, so there are no grammar fans to upset with it. Therefore, Finland can’t have the culture war over pronouns that other languages do. Does that mean Finland’s view on “the trans agenda” is different from an English-speaking country’s view? I genuinely have no idea but it’s something you’d never even think about if you hadn’t had a peek at the language.
Anyway. Tangent. I deleted the first draft because half of it was a tangent and then I go and do it again, but on a completely different subject *coughOxfordboyscough*. Let’s get back to Not Cool.
The book, the journey, the nine cities – they’re all a cover for reflecting on travelling for a living. It’s about how you see the world, what you see in the world and rather than the whole “just one page” thing, Brown makes more about the pitfalls, about how even as you’re writing the guidebook to somewhere, you don’t know enough about it. The only way you can really have the time to get to know the beating heart of a place is to live there. What’s the most important thing about a place? Is it that big obvious thing that everyone is drawn to? Or is the real heart of a place somewhere even most of the locals don’t know about? How does travel shape you? It’s about experiences, problem-solving, problem-sidestepping, adding layers to you, learning, discovering and growing as a person. I’m absolutely not the person I was in 2008. Credit for that goes partly to travelling solo but I admit, being a Girlguiding volunteer will also polish up a lot of so-called soft skills, so it’s hard to say which has added which layers to me as a person and as a writer. No, I think the travel and the blog take sole responsibility for any layers related to writing.
And for me, that’s what’s going to make me keep picking up this book. To keep reminding myself why I travel, why I write and that I don’t need to spend nine summers exploring the nooks and crannies of the same country to write a book about it (not that I plan to stop going to Icelany anytime soon).