Patagonia’ immediately became a bestseller and a much talked-about book.
According to the Guardian, it is “the book that redefined travel writing” and
indeed much has been made of its re-invention of the form. In fact, just flicking
through the book, one immediately notices the uniqueness of its form: the
Vintage Classics copy that I read counts 257 pages divided into 97 chapters,
which comes down to an average of 2.65 pages per chapter. This makes them
look more like quickly jotted-down notes of anecdotal nature than most more
lengthier chapters in any ordinary travel-account. To get a taste of his writing,
here follows all of chapter 84:
“I was in Punta Arenas on a Sunday and went to Matins at St. James’s. I sat
in Charley’s pew, knowing it was his by the brass ferrule screwed on for his
walking stick. An American Baptist minister took the service. His sermon
explained the technical difficulties of building the Verranzano Narrows Bridge,
veered off among ‘Bridges to God’ and ended with a thundering call: ‘Ye shall
be that Bridge!’ He asked us to pray for Pinochet but we were uncertain of the
spirit in which our prayers were offered. In the congregation was an old
Highland shepherd called Black Bob MacDonald who had worked for the Red
Pig. ‘Grand man!’ he said.
I also met an American lady ornithologist, down there to study the fighting
behaviour of Darwin’s Rheas. She said the two males locked necks and whirled
round in circles: the one who got dizzy first was the loser.”
This is a typical Chatwin passage, and even in this one very short chapter,
he knows how to cram in a lot of information about four different drifters (other
than himself): Charley, the American Baptist minister, Black Bob MacDonald
and the American lady ornithologist.
Charley is Charley Milward, and he is the reason the author went to
Patagonia; to visit the land of the ‘Brontosaurus’ that his cousin Charley had
sent over to England from the other side of the world. When Bruce Chatwin was
still a little Bruce, he obsessed over the little piece of ‘Brontosaurus’ skin that
his grandmother kept in a glass cabinet. Cousin Charley was an ‘explorer’ and
had sent the entire animal over to be put up in a museum; but it arrived rotten
and only a piece of leathery skin with coarse reddish hair had remained in the
family.
Charley had been Captain of a ship that sank off the coast of Puntas
Arenas, and it is there that he found the ‘Brontosaurus’. Charley remains a
leitmotiv throughout Chatwin’s account of his own travels, and we are even
treated to a couple of sections where Charley narrates his own adventures,
courtesy of his scrap-book.
But there is much more to ‘In Patagonia’ than just retracing Charley and his
‘Brontosaurus’. Again returning to the above passage, we can see that Chatwin
has a keen eye for painting a portrait of the many people he encounters in a
couple of wide brush-strokes; the American Baptist minister, not wanting to be
intimidated by Patagonia’s wilderness and clinging to Pinochet as a streak of
civilisation (though perhaps sinful), the shepherd Black Bob and the nameless
‘American lady ornithologist’, who is perhaps without a name but certainly not
without a personality.
In fact, ‘In Patagonia’ is so full of these secondary characters and
descriptions of locales and imaginations of historic happenings (shoot-outs and
the like) that Chatwin has created a kaleidoscopic overview of Patagonia’s
geography, history and peoples. Every small chapter is a facet of this region’s
many characteristics, and the whole is much more than the sum of its parts.
This approach takes some getting used to when reading it for the first time,
I must admit, as it might seem very disjointed at the beginning. The best way to
tackle ‘In Patagonia’ is to take it one small chapter at the time and enjoy that
chapter for all it has to offer. Once the book is finished, you will have met some
many people, and heard about so many places and happenings, the only right
thing to do would be to go out and buy a one-way ticket to the land of Charley
and his 'Brontosaurus'.
