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Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered (Tim Cahill, 1997)

Check Amazon for this book: United States (Amazon.com) / International (Amazon.co.uk)

ISBN 1-85702-653-5

Further Reading

By the Same Author

  • Jaguars Ripped My Flesh
  • Pecked To Death by Ducks

Similar Writing

The Amazon ‘Recommendation Centre’ said "If you like Bill Bryson, you’ll probably enjoy Tim Cahill." Well, when he’s not being tiresome about modern convenience architecture (why on earth shouldn’t the good people of St Davids have a McDonalds if they want?), I do enjoy Bill Bryson. And with titles like ‘A Wolverine is Eating My Leg’ and ‘Pecked to Death by Ducks,’ Cahill certainly sounds as if he’d be amusing. So I picked up Remote Journeys – his only title in the book store I visited that day – and surveyed the book jacket.

‘Wacky, incisive and funny’ said Mail on Sunday. ‘Excellent ... incredibly funny’ raved Time Out. Cahill’s photograph was on the back cover. Hell, he even looks a little like Bryson.

Why am I making such a production of this? Well, because this book isn’t funny – not even a little bit – and if you buy it, as I did, under false pretences as it were, you will be disappointed. That isn’t fair on either you or the book.

Nor will you find Paul Theroux’s graceful prose (even when he’s bad, he’s good), his gleeful vicousness, or his vivid characters. This book is a series of two dimensional magazine articles, pumped out to a strict and obvious formula. (Even the introduction has the same structure. It gets repetitious after a while. A short while.) Each ‘chapter’ is an article, unrelated to the others; there is no unifying theme or narrative to the book. This isn’t literature.

Ok, it isn’t literature; is it "travel writing" either? Oddly, given my last paragraph, Remote Journeys is a travel book only in the sense that Theroux’s are. It’s really a book about Tim Cahill. I’ve been there, I’ve done that. As you finish a chapter, there is less sense of actually "knowing" the place where it was set than you’d feel after a chapter of, say, P.J. O’Rourke. (And, let’s face it, evocative description is certainly not the reason you’d turn to PJO.)

But – the key question – did I enjoy it? Bits of it, certainly. Overall, though, I had to push myself to finish; the pages did not turn themselves. I’ll undoubtedly try another of his books, sometime, but unless that experience proves vastly superior to Remote Journeys, I think I might leave it there.

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