Michael Booth: Just as Well I'm Leaving

It so happened I had a cold. A bad cold. And as I had managed to get to an advanced age without any encumberances, ie wife and children, I could take to my bed self-indulgently and tell myself I suffered from the flu. I normally have a supply of books set aside for such an eventuality. My rule is that they must not have anything to do with my everyday concerns, aka neuroses.

Just as Well I'm Leaving fitted the bill perfectly in that it is an amusing travel book, with a nice literary subtext. Michael Booth, a liquor-crazed Brit hack, has a surprisingly dry sense of humour and is not above dissing European cities in a way Chirac himself might envy. Booth has many caustically amusing things to say about Danes. He should know. He married one.

This book is a voyage through the travel writing of a somewhat unusual suspect, Hans Christian Andersen. Scenting a book in the fact it is 200 years since the great Dane died, Booth takes off to revisit the places the intrepid ninny ventured to.

The subtext is that the sexually frustrated Andersen found a kind of existential freedom in anywhere which wasn't Denmark. Today we know it as place where a Tasmanian lass ended up being a princess. In Andersen's day it was a recently bankrupted state which had suffered a succession of defeats. It had lost all its colonies and seemed the epicentre of bitchy small mindedness.

"It can't have been easy having to walk into a room looking like something which fell from the ramparts of Notre Dame," Booth drily writes.

Andersen was socially awkward, from a dirt-poor background, ugly, and obsessed with fame and royalty. Almost coincidentally, he was also the inventor of some of the most protean and achingly chilling children's tales. Booth manages to smoothly tell Andersen's somewhat haunting story, leavening the sorrow with his own form of accident-prone schtick.

I found myself laughing out loud (somewhat catarrhally) several times at Booth's Chaplinesque misadventures through the capitals that brought us the Eurovision Song Contest, Andersen's own travel book in hand. This is a charming, easy to read book, not without its pathos, and I suspect the misanthropic, chronically insecure Andersen — a man who travelled everywhere pushing a wheelbarrow of neuroses before him — would have at least grimaced with empathy at the Brit who accompanies him on this imaginary voyage. In short, if you have a sniffle, or even the actual flu you could safely rely on the soothing medicine of this book.


* $45, Random House