As travellers go, I am an inexcusably snobby one. Not about places or cultures, but about the concept of travel itself: tourists are awful. Wherever I go, I gleefully scorn the straggles of tour groups lumbering around town, with their bumbags and schedules, trapped in someone else’s snapshot of a place. From my lofty pedestal of AirBnb sofa mattresses and activity-free itineraries, I spend most of my holidays feeling comparatively local.
Which is, of course, complete rubbish. In my mind, I am the Paul Theroux of every country I visit: in reality, I’ll occasionally eat something obscure, Instagram a bit and fumble with foreign language, all the while secretly knowing I will only ever skim the surface.
The first time I picked up Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, I was amused and embarrassed to find my unearned snobbery reflected back at me in the first few pages, where upon arriving in north Africa, the male lead Port Moresby loftily observes:
Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveller belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, [Port] would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.
But for all his highbrow aspirations, Port is a bad traveller and his wife Kit no better; two culturally-indifferent Americans with too much baggage (literally and emotionally), and no aims in life except their desire to not be wherever they are at the time. They’re desperate to be satisfied, yet satisfied by nothing: every town they try, the Moresbys sniff at Arab culture and retreat to their unhappy shelter of hotel-room lunches and English speakers.
As they flit across Algeria, Port becomes more and more thrilled by the idea of the remote, while Kit becomes increasingly hysterical as they move further from recognisable society. Suffocating tension builds like a pulse, until the book’s audacious, haunting climax two thirds in. It is not Port but Kit who achieves true isolation, one far greater than her husband’s lofty pretensions, as she glides through the desert, truly alone for the first time.
Bowles began writing The Sheltering Sky in Fez in 1948 and, apparently fuelled by a cocktail of hashish and majoun (cannabis jam), he finished it while moving around Morocco and Algeria, setting the path himself that his doomed characters would take. The Moresbys’ journey is feverishly bleak; the north African landscape “a tortured scrub of hard shells and stiff hairy spines that covered the earth like an excrescence of hatred”; an empty bar is “full of the sadness inherent in all deracinated things”.
I backpacked around Morocco a few years ago, even visiting the Paul Bowles museum in Tangier; and without fail, Bowles’s book whisks up memories of the dry heat, the acrid scent of hot urine on brick, constant sunburn, and the emptiness of an uneasy gut lined only with Coca-Cola. I remember how much I loved its foreignness, and also how aware I was of how foreign I was in it. All the Arabic and hijabs I had in my possession did not shadow my constant awareness that to everyone I met, I was yet another bumbling tourist.
I love old travel yarns, like John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley or Gertrude Bell’s diaries. These tales make me yearn for rare, genuine discovery, for a time when you could clap on a pith helmet and gaze upon cities with eyes untainted by TripAdvisor reviews. But Bowles is my tonic: for all the romance that roses that era, The Sheltering Sky reminds me that everyone was a tad racist back then and tourism was probably awful for everyone involved. Many of Bowles’s books contain a dark and frequent delight in punishing clueless tourists – and as a clueless tourist, the apathetic emptiness of his prose is genuinely terrifying. Bowles has made me a little kinder to those who cling onto the staid civility of coach trips or tour guides: travel can be scary. I understand why someone would want to sardine themselves in the comfort of group travel.
Norman Mailer once wrote: “Paul Bowles opened the world of Hip. He let in the murder, the drugs, the incest, the death of the Square … the call of the orgy, the end of civilisation.” Bowles believed that the idea that civilisation could conquer the whole world was a myth, and it is this idea, above all the horrors and punishments he gloatingly constructs for feckless foreigners, that restores some excitement in me about modern travel.
Seventy years after it was written, The Sheltering Sky still makes me hope for small, still pockets of the world devoid of selfie sticks and itineraries. I am both of the hateful Moresbys: the Kit part of me values the safety found in guidebooks and internet, while the Port part of me itches to punt my Lonely Planet into a sand dune and gallop off into the Sahara. This bleak, beautiful book is both a warning and a temptation.
