REVIEW: The Travels of Ibn Battutah (Ed.) Tim Mackintosh Smith

TITLE:  The Travels of Ibn Battutah
AUTHOR: Ed. Tim Mackintosh Smith
PUBLISHER:      Picador.   (Aug. 2003)
ISBN:   0 330 41879 3          PRICE: A$ 25.00 (paperback)      325 pages

Reviewed by Ann Skea ([EMAIL PROTECTED])

This is a book to read and savour slowly. Ibn Battutah, set off on his travels 
from Tangier in 1303, at the age of twenty-one. He was as full of curiosity and 
as attracted by novel situations and characters as any modern travel-writer, 
and perhaps he had a witty and ironical turn of phrase which kept those who 
later listened to his travel stories enthralled. So, as tales about his 
far-flung adventures spread, the Sultan of Morocco commissioned a young writer 
to take down Ibn Battutah's "memoirs": "I took down from him the names of 
famous people he had met, and we profited greatly from him", wrote this young 
man.

No doubt dictated memoirs are rather more formal than travellers tales told to 
a circle of friends in a garden. In any case, the style of speech and writing 
in Morocco was more formal in the fourteenth-century. Ibn Battutah's memoirs, 
then, amazing and varied as they are, do not have the jokey, caricaturing, 
deliberately reader-friendly sort of style that modern readers of travel-book 
might expect. 

Below the title on the book's cover is a quote from the Guardian which suggests 
that it offers "A picture of medieval civilization without equal in detail and 
brilliance". This is true, and the picture is often fascinating, but (for me) 
the length of the book was also one of its problems. At times it reads like a 
name-dropper's long list of famous people met; or an extensive travel 
itinerary; and it is still a long and comprehensive account of the travels, 
even though Tim Mackintosh Smith has taken his knife to it. I was much more at 
home with Tim Mackintosh Smith's brief, easy-going, humorous style than I was 
with Ibn Battutah's.

Nevertheless, the mixture of anecdotes, fact, magical stories, poetry and 
personal detail and opinion in this book has a definite charm. And there are 
some thought-provoking accounts of easy travel amongst people whose differing 
religious beliefs, now, are a major cause of conflict. The picture of the 
medieval world, too, is sometimes a picture of places which still exist almost 
unchanged since Ibn Battutah saw them, at other times he describes things which 
have since vanished due to disasters of various kinds, but mostly due to war.  
Battutah, as one blurb says, 'dined with sultans, khans and emperors, escaped 
from pirates, sired children on several continents: crossed deserts; dodged the 
Black Death"; and he travelled by every form of transport then available. Like 
any modern traveller he feared for his safety on some journeys, ate unfamiliar 
and sometimes vile-tasting food, and suffered the resulting diarrhoea: some 
things never change.

For serious readers and writers of travel books, this book is a classic - a 
book to keep on your shelf and dip into whenever your get itchy feet and the 
urge for fresh adventures.

*******************************************************************************
**
Copyright © Ann Skea 2003
http://ann.skea.com
Ted Hughes' Pages http://ann.skea.com/THHome 
Ted Hughes: Poetry and Magic: 'The Path of The Tower' now online.