The Turk Who Loved Apples and
Other Tales of Losing My Way around the World. By Matt Gross. Da Capo.
$15.99.
Otherworld Chronicles #1: The
Invisible Tower. By Nils Johnson-Shelton. Harper. $6.99.
Otherworld Chronicles #2: The
Seven Swords. By Nils Johnson-Shelton. Harper. $16.99.
Travelogues have a long and
honorable history, as well as a sometimes checkered one (think of Gulliver’s Travels). Matt Gross, editor
of BonApppetit.com and a frequent contributor to the New York Times travel section, certainly fits The Turk Who Loved Apples into the historical pattern, but readers
not familiar with or enamored of the style of the Times should be forewarned that this book, broken down into a
sufficient number of parts, would fit into that newspaper’s pages very well
indeed; indeed, these are basically
newspaper and magazine essays, modified to form a book-like connected
narrative. What Gross does is elitist travel posing as “getting to know people”
– travel in which he disdains tour guides, guidebooks and travel agents and
uses the Internet only in limited ways. There is abundant room for First World
guilt and soul-searching about Third World countries, for instance, presented
in the vocabulary and the adjectival and adverbial style favored by the Times and other “high-class” media and
sometimes making it seem that travel writers are paid by the word: “Spend
twenty-four hours in Southeast Asia, of course, and you’ve got a history with
hookers. They are tragically, stereotypically, everywhere. …They can be
aggressive, bashful, bipolar, stoned, confused, haughty, alluring. …And this is
only the beginning – there’s a whole rainbow of prostitutes, an infinite
spectrum of the savvy and the innocent, the willing and the enslaved, the vigorous
and the ailing and the desperate. …Are you supposed to be offended by the
intrusion of their presence into your vacation? Or amused, as if they’re
scenery in the louche, Third World atmosphere?” Much of the book is like this –
very well written in a very New York if not quite New Yorker style, elevated and erudite and seeming to stand back
from and examine experience even while experiencing it. It is scarcely
surprising that Gross names Argentina and Vietnam as his favorite countries
among the 60-plus he has visited – because of their “energy.” And it is equally
unsurprising that he has little interest in returning to Germany or Croatia,
which he found “boring” in their resolutely ordinary (to him) everyday pace of
life. Gross says the best way to enjoy travel – and keep it affordable,
although it is hard to imagine him really “roughing it” – is to make friends
with the locals and let them help you with their natural hospitality and
warmth. This is surely a wonderful experience when it happens, and it is surely
more likely in a genuinely unplanned “losing my way” trip than in a carefully
guided and managed one (although Gross never seems really to lose his way, even
when he gets lost here and there). Gross is more than a privileged American –
he is a privileged American journalist,
frequently traveling on assignment and on someone else’s money, and all his
protestations of simply being a tourist evaporate whenever he pauses for
self-consideration, as when he cannot figure out what to write about Chongqing:
“…I considered fleeing not just the city but the country. Could Cathay rebook
me to Hong Kong or Japan? …This trip was an adjunct to an assignment for
another magazine; it would barely cost the Times
a thing; it would be okay.” Gross certainly writes well – in a particular style
that some will like and others loathe; and whatever you may call him or he may
call himself, he is certainly well-traveled and has met and written about some very interesting people. Probably The Turk Who Loved Apples will be of most
interest as a book to carry along while traveling to some of the places that
Gross has visited – assuming your sensibilities are more or less the same as
his.
Travels in imaginary lands
have the advantage that they can be arranged just as the author wishes them to
be – think again of Gulliver’s Travels
– but when those lands are designed for exploration by preteens, as in the Otherworld Chronicles series, they tend
to have certain predictable characteristics. In fact, much of the fun of the
first two books in Nils Johnson-Shelton’s sequence comes from watching Artie
and Kay Kingfisher go on predictable quests in predictable ways with some
predictable results – but with everything just sufficiently skewed so that
readers will not quite know what is
coming next. The basic plot here is a familiar one for a modern preteen novel
series, involving a video game whose setting is real in a parallel dimension of
some sort (Vivian Vande Velde, among others, has used this trope successfully
several times for this age group of readers). What is also familiar, with a
character named Art(ie) King(fisher), is that the protagonist turns out to be a
reincarnation of King Arthur, complete with nobility and quest requirements and
Knights of the Round Table and all that. But these unsurprising elements are
nicely handled by Johnson-Shelton, who has a good sense of plot pacing and does
not delay the expected revelations – he gets them out of the way quickly so he
can develop the story. The King Arthur element, for example, shows up within 30
pages of the start of the first book: “I know much about you, Arthur. You have
nothing to fear from me. You are my king! You are my king and I am now and
forevermore at your service!”
Johnson-Shelton does a reasonably good job of leavening the adventure
with levity, thanks in part to his chapter titles, most being of the “In Which”
variety: “In Which Artie Wonders, What the Heck Is a Font, Anyway?” “In Which
Artie and Kay Are Tested One More Freaking Time.” “In Which Artie Plays a
Little Let’s Make a Deal!” “In Which
Merlin Apologizes for Being an Insensitive Wizard.” And as for plot – well, in The Invisible Tower, originally
published last year and now available in paperback, Artie learns of his kingly
provenance and, having won the video game about Otherworld, has to find a way
to save the real Otherworld, which
comes complete with wolves and dragons and all those sorts of things. In The Seven Swords, the newly published
second book, Artie must send his knights to find the swords of the title; he
must battle giants and ogres and all those sorts of things; and he needs to deal
with a few surprises, such as the fact that the Peace Sword turns out to be the
weapon used by Mordred to kill the original King Arthur. There are enough
twists and turns in the Otherworld
Chronicles to keep the series interesting – and it is a series, not just a two-book sequence. Nevertheless, the
formulaic plot elements both in “quest” terms and in “video game” terms
somewhat hold back the entertainment value of Johnson-Shelton’s books. The
novels are not quite romps, not quite adventures to be taken seriously, not
fully innovative but not entirely derivative. They are a blend of pluses and
minuses, more positive than negative on the whole, but ultimately best for
readers who enjoy dialogue along these lines (Kay speaking to Artie): “Far out,
Your Kingliness.”
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