Published in The Irish Times
July 2023
I became a travel writer by accident. When I turned 30, I set out on an eight-month walk to Istanbul, a journey of 4,000km, having come down at a formative age with a Patrick Leigh Fermor obsession. I knew I would write about that walk – tracing the “great trudge” he had done in the early 1930s – but not what form that writing would take: maybe a novel, maybe something else. In the end it became a travel book, the most natural shape for it. Walking the Woods and the Water was published in 2014.
Two more travel books followed that, and an odd little book about parakeets. Making long journeys on foot and writing seemed to go hand in hand, or rather step by step. Journeys contain their own narrative, with a beginning, middle and end – in terms of structure, my main task was knowing when to speed up and when to slow down. I loved researching and writing these books, and there will be more journeys to come. But fiction was always my first love, and it nagged me throughout this time.
During the pandemic, like many of my colleagues, I became a cliche: a no-longer-able-to-travel-writer turned novelist. The idea I was working on was something I had attempted before, and despairingly given up on twice. On the second occasion the failure felt final, and I told myself not to look back. But somehow in 2020, amid the boredom and the dread – and the suffering of my wife, who was drastically ill for that year – the words at last began to flow. Who knows how these things happen? It was certainly a form of escape, and perhaps a means of exerting control. I fled to Aztec Mexico in the early 16th century.
But not that Aztec Mexico. Not content merely to run to the past, I ran to a parallel universe too: to a world in which Moorish Spain was never reconquered by the Christians, and survived as Islamic al-Andalus into the early modern era. In this alternate history, the first ships to cross the Atlantic in 1492 are crewed not by Spaniards but by Moors, and – at least initially – they come for trade, not conquest. The novel, Red Smoking Mirror, is set in 1521 in the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán, and centres around the love between two people from different cultures.
But none of that would have been possible without real journeys I had made. In my early 20s, I spent a year travelling through Mexico, from the tropical jungles of the south to the high desert of the north. I visited the abandoned Mayan temples of Yucatán and the monumental Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán, and in Mexico City – built on the ruins of the Aztec island capital – I saw the last remaining puddles of the great lake, long since drained. Also in Mexico City, I spent time with the murals of the painter Diego Rivera, tributes to the sophistication and splendour of Aztec civilisation. Visions of that complex culture got into my head and stayed there.
After leaving Mexico, I went to Los Angeles and then, for reasons not worth explaining, immediately to Morocco. Landing in Marrakesh having done no mental preparation, I understood for the first time the meaning of culture shock. It was like simultaneously going mad and waking up in a dream. All around me were men in hooded djellabas, alleyways out of a fairy tale, mules and camels, teeming souks, and the hot wind of the Sahara. I went north to Fes and Chefchaouen, which were no less extraordinary, and then took the boat to Spain. These worlds met in Andalusia.
Spain was the cultural Venn diagram of the Maghreb and Mexico – from where the legacy of the Moors flowed west to the New World. I became obsessed with a date, the year 1492: not only when, as the poem goes, “Columbus sailed the ocean blue”, but also when the last Moorish king was expelled from Granada. The legend says that Muhammad XII, whom the Spanish called Boabdil, looked back at the city he had lost from the pass known as the Moor’s Last Sigh.
But what if he had not looked back? What if the Moors had stayed?
Those journeys in Mexico, Morocco and Spain were almost 15 years old when Red Smoking Mirror emerged in the spring of 2020. This gulf, I found to my surprise, was conducive for writing fiction. Travel writing and nonfiction are genres of hard factual edges (even if travel, my own included, might blur those edges sometimes). But fiction, at least for me, requires a softer focus. The landscapes I had travelled through had become corroded by time, their edges blurred by memory. Instead of things, what remained were atmospheres and sensations. In cognitive neuroscience – in my dim understanding, anyway – memories are not like photographs that remain fixed in time; rather, they are images repainted with every viewing. To remember is to reimagine, and each layer adds something new. Memories are mestizo cultures of truth and imagination.
When I think back to a white sand beach on the Caribbean coast, or the sight of purple mountains, or the lines on someone’s face, am I really remembering? Or am I reinventing? This is a conundrum shared by the narrator of my novel. Eli Ben Abram, the Jewish merchant who led the first Moorish ships across the sea – established now in Tenochtitlán with his Nahua wife, Malinala – is looking back at his earlier travels from a distance of 29 years. “The bone whiteness of a beach. Unexpected purple hills. The ears of my chestnut horse pricked towards a mountain range. The mountains fearsome, bright with snow.” Is he really remembering, or is he writing his own fiction?
As much as the narrative arc of the novel, with its tantalising counterfactual what-ifs, what I found myself interested in were the small, vivid details. The snails climbing up the walls; the yellow lizard floating dead in a puddle after the rain; the loll of a dog’s tongue as it paces down an alley. These are the kinds of random things I remember after travelling, while timetables, schedules and dates – sometimes even the names of cities, rivers, regions and mountain ranges – recede with the passing of time into hazy amalgamation.
The lesson I learned by writing this novel? No experience is wasted. Things drift back from the river of years, distorted but recognisable, and dazzle in unexpected ways. Red Smoking Mirror is fantasy – but it is a travel book too.