Published: April 18, 2021
The brilliant William Atkins has reviewed Outlandish for the Financial Times, engaging deeply and thoughtfully with the themes of the book. I’m beyond thrilled.
The Australian author Robyn Davidson once observed that travel writing suffers from a “weird allergy to itself”. Even some of its best-known practitioners, herself included, reject the label, perhaps out of a resistance to being pigeonholed, but perhaps, too, because of a suspicion that “travel writing” is frivolous, even morally dubious.
Nick Hunt doesn’t mind the label, but recognises that the old ways of going about it are, in every way, unsustainable. “As a travel writer increasingly aware of the damage that travel can do — mainly, of course, the chemical violence done to the stratosphere by flying — I was looking for transformative journeys that lay nearer to home,” he writes.
Outlandish is his account of four pre-pandemic journeys by train and on foot and bicycle, to Europe’s “outlands” — environments that “seemed to belong to another part of the world, or even to another historical or geological era”: tundra (in the Scottish Cairngorms), jungle (Poland’s primeval Białowieża forest), desert (Andalucía’s Tabernas, Europe’s only “real” desert) and steppe (the Great Hungarian Plain).
Hunt’s first book, Walking the Woods and the Water, described a walk across Europe in the footprints of Patrick Leigh Fermor, darling of anglophone 20th-century travel writing; his second, Where the Wild Winds Are, followed the named winds of the continent. His waymarkers and guides, then, have tended to be ethereal — ghosts, shadows, disturbances of air. Beneath its declared search for “transformative” environmental exclaves, Outlandish too seeks to discover the invisible — not only continental borders, but felled forests, melted snows and pastures subsumed by desert.In Scotland’s tundra, looking for the Cairngorms’ diminishing year-round snow-patches, Hunt is stalked by a sinister figure who may be real, or may be the Big Grey Man of Gaelic myth, a “ghost or a yeti-like humanoid”, projected into the world from the author’s taxed psyche. As he approaches the remnant Białowieża forest of eastern Poland, he realises he is moving back in time, leaving behind what he calls the Clearing — the western Europe that was once similarly forested. In Hungary, he cycles across the Hortobágy region, the westernmost extension of the Eurasian steppe, a “symbolic repository of the national origin story”. In this place “centred upon the economy of grass”, Hunt finds another sort of absence: ancient herding traditions replaced by cowboy theatre for the tourists, farms revived as dude ranches.
If on the surface Outlandish is, like much travel writing, a search for anomalies — places out of place — it becomes a reckoning with what has been squandered, and with an environmental future that often seems too horrifying to face. The book’s penultimate chapter, in which Hunt confronts the existential crisis foreshadowed in the previous chapters, is as strange and haunting as anything in the recent literature of place. It’s no coincidence that it unfolds in the desert, mythic realm of testing as well as transcendence. “The desert drives people crazy,” he is warned.
During a heatwave that kills 1,500 people across Europe, Hunt establishes his camp in a shaded canyon deep in Spain’s Tabernas desert, a kind of makeshift monk’s cell. But turning anchorite, he suffers an anchorite’s visions. During his daily outings into the blazing light, he is shadowed by a mysterious figure, “a kind of heatstruck demon materialising out of the air”, always distant and obscure, part itinerant, part mirage — twin of the Big Grey Man of the Cairngorms. Whereas in his other outlands he was “walking into loss,” Hunt writes, “my immersion in Tabernas feels like something else: an unconscious acclimatisation to conditions yet to come.” Those spectres that have dogged him across Europe are refigured as emissaries from the worst of futures. In this beautiful, disquieting book, Hunt helps us to look them in the eye.