Jan Morris: A Writer's World: Travels 1950-2000

Reviewed by PETER CALDER

For an early foray into journalism, it wasn't a bad scoop: Jan (then James, of which more later) Morris went, on behalf of The Times, as a reporter on the British expedition to Mt Everest in May 1953.

His despatch, carefully encoded to protect its exclusivity, has become part of the folklore of one of the century's iconic moments: "Snow conditions bad," it read, which by prior arrangement was interpreted on the newsdesk in London as "summit reached".

The rest of the short message was similarly cryptic. "Advance base abandoned" and "Awaiting improvement" identified Hillary and Tenzing as the successful members of the party.

The drama of the day is the subject of the first piece in this collection but Morris includes a self-deprecating note. Tuning in on the short-wave, he hears the BBC report the news which had been "announced in a copyright dispatch in The Times". No longer required to keep his scoop secret in Kathmandu, he flings open the window and bellows to the startled and sleepy Sherpas that "Everest is done with."

"OK, sahib," the sherpas shout back. "Breakfast now?"

So much — too much — travel writing is a form of self-aggrandisement. The traveller rather than the place is in the centre of the frame and the writer's self-congratulation for being so clever as to be there crowds out any sense of what "there" is.

Morris avoids this trap with enormous elegance. We are always aware of the writer in the landscape — and reminded that all journalism is mediated observation and not objective assessment. But the writer is never in the way.

This collection culled from Morris' journalism and her dozen and a half travel books is not all about places. At times — as we are taken into the courtoom where Adolf Eichmann is standing trial or as the sun sets on the British Empire in Hong Kong — we have the sense of being witnesses to history. But mostly we accompany the writer on what she calls "my vagrant life", visiting several dozen places from Cuzco to Casablanca.

It is in that latter city, by way of surgery, that James became Jan in 1972, solving what she calls the conundrum of her lifetime conviction that "I had been born into the wrong body and should really be a woman."

Some have found that the transformation was matched by a change of style, from muscular and masculine to lush and feminine. That change eluded this reader, though that is not to say that Morris is not capable of some purple prose: her comparison of the English stage knights to the admirals of old is a bit rich. But this is a treasury of the precise memory of a well-travelled man and woman. Dip in at a place you have been to and see how well she nails it. Then read on.

Faber and Faber, $55