Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town

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The rhetoric is so offensive and plain bizarre to anyone making her or his life in “Africa” that I had no option but to pretend that we were in a different genre, to keep imagining the book as a comic novel with a deliberately unlikeable narrator.

Paul Theroux's many books include Picture Palace, which won the 1978 Whitbread Literary Award; The Mosquito Coast, which was the 1981 Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and joint winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was also made into a feature film; Riding the Iron Rooster, which won the 1988 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; The Pillars of Hercules, shortlisted for the 1996 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; My Other Life: A Novel, Kowloon Tong, Sir Vidia's Shadow, Fresh-air Fiend and Hotel Honolulu. It's an ambitious trip, all overland, including areas not much visited by tourists (notably Sudan, and parts of Ethiopia and Mozambique -- though even Theroux doesn't make it to Somalia).It was by choice that Theroux didn't walk into an Internet cafe in a cell-sized wooden shack in almost any African shantytown and get his wife in Hawaii to fax him the New York Times crossword puzzle. Also everywhere are the aid workers, many affiliated with religious groups, and Theroux has his fun with the proselytisers. Even at the end of his trip, through all the corruption and horror Africa's dictators have visited on their lands and people, the beaten, oppressed Africans Theroux has met (. Dark Star Safari is, however, a very enjoyable read, and it does present a good picture of aspects of Africa. Can he live a life so removed from the world that he has completely missed the international campaign against antipersonnel mines, a campaign that has produced acres of reportage and dozens of books and which culminated in the Landmine Ban Treaty of 1998, the best-known piece of international legislation of recent times?

In the mountains of Ethiopia he traces the steps of Richard Francis Burton and Rimbaud to a medieval walled city where hyenas roam the streets.It made me want to go there, though not for the horror, the hot spots, the massacre-and-earthquake stories you read in the newspaper; I wanted the pleasure. Even when he relishes a place, it often seems that it is the dirt, the stink and the squalor that inspires him. The Christian Science Monitor is an international news organization offering calm, thoughtful, award-winning coverage for independent thinkers.

His novels include The Bad Angel Brothers, The Lower River, Jungle Lovers, and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari.He mints generalisations and insults at such a clip that they soon begin to outstrip even the most gifted parodist. and people (that is, Blacks) respond, not surprisingly, in a positive way to this bold assertion of his own rights to individuality. Paul Theroux has written many works of fiction and travel writing, including the modern classics The Great Railway Bazaar , The Old Patagonian Express , My Secret History and The Mosquito Coast . In Zambia,everyone seems to be infected with AIDs,as girls as young as ten are forced into prostitution.

In ''The Great Railway Bazaar,'' for instance, we board the fabled Orient Express to the sound of Theroux's cabinmate filling the chamber pot at midnight. In some African countries it is international aid agencies that provide the most consistent source of employment. It is currently my bed-time book and it has been total pleasure to have what feels like a chin-wag with this interesting man, who is opening my eyes in such a well written way.Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH).