Full Length reviews and profiles of Truck Fever, A journey Through Africa by Manchán Magan
The Independent, October
5, 2008
Review by Tom
Boncza-Tomaszewski of Truck Fever
Riding in the back of a truck from London to Nairobi,
sharing your journey with 18 strangers, one of whom you have to choose as your
cooking partner and another as the person you're going to share a tent with,
sounds like hell on wheels. If you've read any of Manchán Magan's travel
adventures before, though, you'll appreciate it's the kind of situation his
writing thrives on.
A little like Jon Ronson, but without the faux naivety and
tendency to wheedle interminably, Magan is an outsider: "In a more
sophisticated community, it might have made me a leader, but here I sensed I
was as likely to end up the runt." Under the guidance of group leader Suzi
("one of those indomitable, fiery women who had formed the backbone of the
Empire during the colonial days") the haphazard travellers, including a
couple of public schoolgirls and a man who claims he used to be a torturer in
the British Army, encounter drug runners, missionaries and witch doctors.
Somehow Magan manages to write about it all without insulting anyone.
SUNDAY TRIBUNE by
June Edwards, Sept 28, 2008
In search of adventure
and self-fulfilment, Manchan Magan tells of a six-month journey 18 years ago.
June Edwards weighs up the pros and cons of hindsight
TRUCK FEVER recounts in vivid detail seasoned traveller
Manchan Magan's overland trip from London to Nairobi in an ex-army truck shared
with 19 fellow travellers, all escaping Thatcher's Britain, when he was just
20.
Fans of the Irish travel writer, journalist and TG4
broadcaster won't be disappointed by his latest offering; the only trouble with
it is that Magan is now a man of 38, and recounting stories with the hindsight
of almost two decades is surely problematic in terms of how we remember events.
Readers might in fact prefer the reflections of maturity as opposed to the raw
self-absorption of youth.
Magan is undeniably an excellent writer, and has a wonderful
talent for transporting the reader into the heart of every experience, from the
heavily mint-scented Atlas mountains in Morocco to the worst,
intestine-churning suffering of having dysentery in Niger. He is an intelligent
observer of people and places, and his writing is sensitive and engaging.
However, he has an irritating habit of being extremely
judgemental, which, if this book had been written when he was 20, would be
understandable. But with the maturity of middle age, readers might expect a
little less black-and-white summing up of his fellow travellers.
For example, "the three nurses – Stella, Felicity and
Dorothy – were all rather similar; women in their mid-thirties, each brimming
with common sense and low self-esteem." In this one cutting sentence he
writes off three individuals, who from there on are frequently referred to as
"the nurses". He is quick to pick out everyone's flaws. Henry has
spent 40 years "diligently buckled under the leash of convention." In
other words, he had a job as a quantity surveyor, all a little too dull for the
young Magan who had loftier plans for his life, not to mention a well-to-do
middle-class family to sustain him in his adventures, albeit from a distance!
The girls on the trip, Lucy and Natasha, are treated
somewhat more kindly. Young, pretty and privately educated, they come from a
similarly privileged background as the author.
Personality aside - and don't get me wrong, because Magan
comes across as a likeable and decent human being - Truck Fever is a great
read. Even the route the travellers take across Europe, from Spain to North
Africa, and through Central Africa and southward, amounts to fascinating stuff.
And Magan doesn't gloss over the fact that this six-month
journey was hellish in parts, and brought out the baser side of both himself
and his companions...like the Christmas Day when he beat up one of his retired
co-travellers after a dispute about stealing a bottle of Bailey's Irish Cream.
Nor does he glorify living in tents with no toilets or washing facilities for
half a year.
Ultimately, what emerges from this book is the senselessness
and unfairness of the world. While the twenty travellers have paid £1,000, a
lot of money in the late '80s, to endure a difficult and dangerous trip into
the heart of Africa for adventure and self-fulfilment, they encounter a young
boy at the port in Morocco, who has paid a similar amount of money to an
illegal trafficker to get into Spain in the hope of a better life.
Elsewhere in the desert they meet children who have walked
for days in search of a can of water, and it is the sensitive re-telling of
these events which saves Magan from the self-indulgence which is always at the
edge of his writing.
SUNDAY
TELEGRAPH, Sept 2008, review of Truck Fever
Magan likes a challenge: in 2007 he went round Ireland
speaking only Irish, and his account of travelling through America, Angel’s and
Rabies, was both funny and sensual.
His latest book is an account of a truck journey from London
to Mombassa with a group of drop-outs. The witch doctors, drug runners and
missionaries they meet en route provide plenty of good stories, but by Magan’s
own admission, these are little more than a “rapid series of superficial
images” compared to the stormy dynamics of the group in the truck. Magan is
especially good at conveying the traveller’s feeling of isolation within a
crowd.
THE
SCOTSMAN 13TH September, 2008, Review of
Truck Fever
More extreme travel from the author of Angels And Rabies, in
which Magan goes by truck from London to Nairobi with a group of, well,
'eccentrics' is the kind word. As you'd expect it's comic and gruesome in equal
measure.
WESTMEATH
EXAMINER 20 Sept 2008 - Review of Truck Fever
Take a grand apiece off
20 strangers, fling them into a truck and promise them a six month
journey overland – and through Africa – and what do you get?
Well, if you are
Westmeath writer Manchán Magan, you get bihlarzia, you get your character
tested, you find yourself living a ‘Lord of the Flies’ life, and, eightenn
years later, you get a remarkable travel book from it.
For Manchán, who lives in Collinstown, ‘Truck Fever: a
journey through Africa’ is his third travel book and since he’s now turning to
fiction, likely to be his last.
The book recalls a trip he took while he was just eighteen,
and still mourning the death of his father, who remains, nonetheless, a
constant presence through the writer’s adventures.
This is, however, much less a book about Africa than about
the dynamics of the group of nurses, post A-level students, middle-aged
travellers, and their leader and mechanic/driver, who pitched their lot in
together for 6 months, and squabbled and bickered along the way.
Rule with a dictatorial hand by Suzi, the leader who had led
several previous such expeditions to Africa before, this was a claustrophobic
experience. We spend only 8 hours a day with the people with whom we work,a nd
not much more than that daily with our families either. It is fascinating,
therefore to read how it works when a group is travelling in the same truck all
day, sleeping in the same encampments at nigh, and having to rmain sane and
civilised.
Remainng sane and civilised is less easy than it might
appear, and it’s clear from Manchán’s book that ‘civility’ was one of the
conventions that frequently packed up its rucksack and snuck away from the
group. There is one fascinatingly tense section in which the group fetch up in
a small remote village, and are told to wait for the ferry which will arrive a
day later to take them up the Congo River to Kisangani, where Suzi and the
mechanic will meet up with them again.
The boat doesn’t arrive; half the party have their passports
stolen, and Manchán discovers in himself a set of high principles that won’t
let him abandon the party members whose passports have been stolen – even
though he still has his own.
A nightmare trip ensues, during which the group, now
penniless without drinking water, and indeed, many of them ill, finally get to
make their way back to Kisangani.
Although that incident came close to the end of their trip,
it deeply divided the group. Those who had lost their passports, and the
honourable ones who remained with them were embittered towards those who had
decided to forge on and fend for themselves, abandoning those who been less
lucky.
It’s still a mystery to Manchán why Suzi didn’t come back
with the truck, looking for the group after they failed to turn up, when
planned at Kisangani.
A beautiful writer, Manchán does give glimpses of Africa.
There’s a surreal story of the city of Gbadolite – a modern glass and steel
oasis built by President Mobutu – but without substance.
‘It’s a lie,’ Suzi tells the group. ‘There’s nobody in the
offices or the restaurants. There’s no food in the supermarket. It’s all a
charade.’
There’s sadness too in his description of how Aids is
affecting so many people in Africa; the young; the beautiful; the talented. He
falls briefly in love with a girl, but she is honest and tells him she ‘la
sida’, as its known in French.
Early in his day in Africa, there’s a magical section:
Manchán is befriended by a young African called Mustafa, and it’s through
Mustafa that Manchán and some of the other group have their first ‘real’
experiences of Africa.
This is a great read. It doesn’t lecture about how poor
Africa is; it doesn’t slate the West for what we’ve done there; it doesn’t trot
out the clichés. It provide a picture of a country that is not as backward as
it might appear from here when we see the newsclips of disasters and famines
there.
In ways, however, Africa is just a backdrop. We see a
beautiful country, but realise that because they are tied together as an
independent group, the internal politics, friendships, tensions and experiences
are to the forefront, and for that group of twenty, their experiences become
more about their interactions with each other than with Africa. It is,
therefore, a book that will be of as much interest to those fascinated by
humans as to those fascinated by Africa.
Manchán has two other travel books to his name, each as
fascinating as the other. When you’ve read ‘Truck Fever: a journey through
Africa,’ go looking for ‘Angels and Rabies,’ an account of his time in South
America nad Canada, and then ‘Manchán’s Travels: a journey through India.’
EVENING
HERALD, Lost in Africa: a voyage of self-discovery
By Tom
Galvin,Sat Sept 13 2008
YOU may remember him as the man who put the Irish nation to
shame with his No Bearla series on RTE, but -- get your phlegm ready -- Manchan
Magan has been around for some time, traipsing the globe and producing both
films and books for armchair adventurers.
His books thus far have taken him across India (Manchan's
Travels: A Journey Through India, Brandon, €14.99) and South America (Angels
and Rabies, Brandon, €14.99), while his latest, Truck Fever -- A Journey
through Africa (Brandon, €14.99) recounts his expedition in an ex-army truck
from London to Nairobi with a group of other lost souls, on a trip that you
used to see advertised in the small ads section in the back of Sunday papers.
While there are no dates to mark the year of passage through
the Dark Continent, Magan mentions in the opening chapter that he "had
£1,000 saved and no idea what to do with it. I was barely 20 years of age. I
knew little about anything. My dad had just died. . . I felt I had to get
away."
Since £1,000 wouldn't buy you floor space in a smuggler's
van these days and Magan, as we know, is a good deal older than 20, we can
deduce that the trip was made in the late 80s, driven by sentiments most of us
of a certain vintage can fully empathise with: escape, at any price.
The danger relating a travel experience two decades later is
accounting for change -- something which would have altered the book dramatically
should Magan have tried -- begging the question as to the value of such a book
given the number of years that have passed.
It doesn't matter. In fact, the best travel writing only
improves with age, making the experience for the armchair adventurer both
spatial and temporal. And Truck Fever is travel writing at its hair-raising
finest.
Apart from wanderlust, Machan -- or Mocha, as his fellow
travellers refer to him as -- is clearly on a personal, spiritual journey after
the death of his father.
The combination of reportage and introspection is always
risky in the travel genre, since readers are ultimately concerned with the
exterior environment.
But Magan is a good, pacey writer and his charm and instinct
afford the reader that much width when it comes to sharing his own personal
travails. You do care about him, and that's a wonderful thing.
As for the other members of the group, the years may have
been kind to them but Magan certainly hasn't. Which is possibly why he left 20
years between them before painting some hilarious, eccentric, gross and
scurrilous characters into his tale. It adds to the dark humour and creates an
incredible microcosm for the reader to observe. But I hope he's very far away
if and when his former fellow travellers read it.
VERBAL
MAGAZINE An African adventure to be savoured, by Cathal Coyle.
Review of Truck Fever
For the past eight
years Manchán (pronounced Man-a-hawn) Magan and his brother Ruán have travelled
the world making a series of documentaries for Irish Language Network TG4
titled Global Nomad.
This ‘travelogue’ precedes these recent adventures and
involves Manchán travelling overland from London to Nairobi in a truck (in the
words of the author “an old troop transporter”) with what can only be described
as a motley crew; including privately educated schoolgirls and a locksmith
claiming to be a UFO abductee.
Truck Fever is a rollercoaster of adventure, anecdote and
fresh observations about the nature of Africa and what it means to travel
through the dark continent. Arriving in
Morocco, driving through the Sahara and across the centre to Kenya, the six
month journey contains a set of adventures that are poignant as well as crazy.
In the town of Rutshuru in the Virunga Mountains the truck accidentally knocks
down a Frenchman who is speeding down a hill on a child’s scooter, while
another ‘hairy’ moment sees the group come face-to-face with silverback gorillas
that are fortunately of a docile temperament!
Not all recollections are light hearted; when describing the
attempt to avoid dehydration as water bottles had run dry, Magan records their
anxiety of the risks involved in drinking water from African rivers such as the
Zambezi. Purification tablets only work effectively against micro-organisms,
and the travellers had to run the risk of catching disease when drinking the
water. The reader catches a glimpse of
the trials of living and travelling in a developing country.
The style of Truck Fever is very personal – and not simply
on the part of the author. He
successfully relays the thoughts, feelings and anguish of his colleagues to the
reader. Magan’s use of language is
delightful, he quotes one of the travellers main reason for undertaking such an
arduous journey as being: “my life is more or less a selfish one, and now
springs up the opportunity of wiping off a little of the long score standing
against me.”
Written shortly after Magan’s father had deceased, the
author places a great emphasis on the dreams he has of an imaginary friend,
Johan. While initially he isn’t convinced that he is dreaming about his
recently deceased father, but having read Carlos Castenada in school he tries
to train himself to become conscious in his dreams to discover the true meaning
of them. This voyage of personal
discovery is fascinating, and Magan incorporates this sub-theme skilfully into
the travelogue.
The beauty of Truck Fever ultimately lies in its narration,
Magan conveys the essence of his journey to the reader, and towards the end of
the book he acknowledges the people and places that infused him with
experiences and helped him to develop as a person.
WESTMEATH
EXAMINER PROFILE -Forever on the road
less travelled by Eilis Ryan
Once upon a time, there lived a man, in Collinstown, in a
house made entirely of straw bales.
And the wind huffed and it puffed, but his little straw
house stayed standing.
Manchan Magan,
writer, documentary maker, and now novelist, was living a what sounds like a
complete death-trap, although he denies that that’s what it was.
“The reason I moved to Westmeath was to learn how to write.
So I needed somewhere cheap, so I could build this..’nest’, so I built this
house out of bales of straw, as I’d learnt to do in Africa, where they were
building out of whatever was lying around them.
With his own self-taught electrical and plumbing skills, the
house had in place a necklace of electric sockets and a stove with a back
boiler. Despite how it sounds, it was safe enough, and cosy enough, and that
was Manchán’s home for five years, until a crack came in the walls Eventually,
he wound up building a “conventional” house – albeit with a grass roof.
Not entirely conventional is Manchán, a tall, youthful and
studenty-looking 38 year-old who can be seen regularly flying around the roads
of North Westmeath on his bicycle, after his day’s work has been done.
In fact, he says, he is a hermit, although probably only as
much of a hermit as it is possible to be, if one wishes also to earn a living
as a documentary maker and writer.
“I now have the balance. I did the going out once or twice a
week to some sort of social occasion, and the more I do it, the more I yearn to
get back to my house.”
He is disciplined, sitting down to his desk at 10 a.m. each
morning, and writing until 3 p.m., before setting off on his cycling spins, and
that discipline has – after, he claims, six years of rejection slips – seen him
publish three travel books, and have one fiction book – in Irish - placed with
a publisher, so watch out at Christmas for the arrival in the shops. He’s
currently working on a screenplay.
The third of those travel books - Truck Fever: A Journey
Through Africa – is about to hit the shops, bringing to an end, Manchan says,
his writings about those big trips of his youth.
Writing is all he ever wanted to do.
“So, I decided to live in Collinstown for as long as it took
me to learn how to write,” he says – although he has long outstayed that
deadline, and has no inclination to move on from there in the foreseeable
future, not while there’s a newly-planted 18,000 tree forest planted on his
land there, in which he delights.
In his early days, when he wasn’t making any headway in his
attempts to get published, it was tough going, he recalls.
“I’d get so depressed, and a local farmer, Billy Connelly,
he’d try and keep me sane. I knew there was nothing else I wanted to do but
write. On TV, you couldn’t get the ideas across the way you wanted to.
“I’d much rather not being able to eat than not to write,”
he says. “I want to get so much better until I do write a book that is worthy
of a big audience.
“Normally, people want a family and kids, and I have never
been materialistic, and there’s nothing in the world I particularly want, as I
noticed when I went to Africa, except finding a way of expressing my thoughts.”
“I wanted to write those three books, about that period
travelling. And now I want to try to get into fiction.”
That travel trilogy began with “Angels and Rabies” in which
he wrote about his experiences in South America and Canada; and was followed up
by “Manchan’s Travels: A Journey Through India”, an account of his time living
in a shed in India, his somewhat involuntary role in helping a young gay Indian
youth make it from his village to city life, and his (Manchan) earliest forays
into documentary-making.
This latest book recalls Manchan's earliest big trip, when
he signed up, in London, for a six-month trip overland by truck through Africa,
along with twenty strangers.
last travel book (see review on page 3 of the “Examiner
Plus”).
Truck Fever: A Journey Through Africa is, like the other
books, nothing short of startlingly confessional.
On that trip, that there was bullying, Manchan admits. That
he didn’t disassociate himself from it, he admits. That he didn’t stand up
against it – partly out of fear that he would, as he describes it, “become
their patsy, their pliant bitch”, he also admits.
But then again, he says too that the one thing all twenty
travellers had in common was “low self-esteem”.
While others might have been tempted – eighteen years on –
to “gloss up” their own heroism, Manchan doesn’t.
“There’s an onus on a writer …you have to be honest,” he
says, admitting that some of it makes for uncomfortable reading.
He was, however, just 20 at the time, but having kept a
diary for the entire trip, can say what happened where, and when. But to focus
on that early, naievte, that fear of being the “runt” of the group, and of
keeping his head low to avoid being assigned that role, is to catch just a
glimpse of who Manchán was at the start of that trip.
Much more significant is the time when some of the group
found their passports stolen, and who were, consequently, unable to leave the
village from where they had been due to catch a ferry upriver – which
incidentally, didn’t turn up when planned. Feeling responsible for their
predicament, Manchán chose not to take the easy option, and leave with others
who had secured a way out, but to stay with those who were suddenly faced with
the nightmare of being stranded in an isolated African village with little
money, no passports, and no way way out.
That decision, and that experience, changed him.
“I did have money, and I could have escaped, but that
completely idealistic decision I made – ‘I’ll stay with these people; these are
my friends’ – I felt so vainglorious and proud of my decision at the time.
“I decided: ‘I want to live a life which isn’t dictated by
fear, but by high ideals’. If I had pushed onto the boat I would have got out
with the others, but I was thinking: ‘This is who I want to be. I want to be
the person who doesn’t react in small ways, and doesn’t react out of fear’.”
He knew then he wasn’t going to come home and get a “normal”
job, and he has, still, pretty much lived his life to the ideals he realised in
Africa.
“I have turned down a lot of opportunities,” he says.
Manchán had never been back to Africa since that trip until
May of this year, when the Irish Times sent him to Zambia.
“It was a really important trip: it got me completely hooked
again and realising Africa had got under my skin, and wouldn’t let me go.
“There’s a lot of stories I want to tell. I want to do a
trip maybe looking at sustainable tourism. We have to start understanding
Africa more, and that it has so much to offer.”
Documentaries
Although he writes all the time, Manchán is perhaps better
known to the general public as the face in front of the camera on the host of
travel documentaries he made with his brother, Ruan, who until just a couple of
weeks ago, lived in Castlepollard.
It was Ruan who got him involved in documentary making,
tracking him down to the shed he lived in in India, and persuading him to join
him in making a travel series for TG4.
There followed several others, mainly in the Irish language,
but with English language versions filmed simultaneously and sold on to t.v.
stations abroad.
Last year, he was back on the t.v. screens with “No Béarla”,
a series in which he attempted to travel around Ireland using only the Irish
language. He has also made a a couple of historical documentaries, one of which
is blurbed by Mancháhimself thus:
“Sighle Humphreys, society belle and crack-shot Irish rebel,
was my grandmother. In her house on Ailesbury road was a secret room in which
the Irish rebel leaders, Michael Collins, de Valera, etc, hid out,’ explains
the presenter, Manchán Magan
“In Nov 1922 the house was raided by Free State Soldiers and
the IRA leader, Ernie O’Malley came out shooting. In the ensuing gun battle my
great-grandmother was shot through the brain, yet survived. One man died. Who
killed him – my granny or Ernie?”
It’s credentials like these that have got Manchán the few
nice steady writing jobs that keep him going at the moment. He writes
occasionally for The Guardian, he has a regular travel slot on the RTE news
show “Drivetime” on Wednesdays, what he describes as “an enthusiastic guide to
travel destinations – as an enthusiast rather than an expert”; and a weekly
column in the Irish Times’s Saturday travel magazine – “Magan’s World – Tales
Of A Travel Addict”.
He is also about to guest-edit the next Midland Arts
magazine.
In addition, he has done readings at The Electric Picnic,
and at writer Pat McCabe’s “Flat Lake Festival” in Monaghan.
He’s involved locally with the “Co-Motion” film festival for
young people, and with Shawbrook School of Dance as well as with the Midland
Young Writers’ group in Kilbeggan.
He loves kids and young people. Although he is currently so
focused on writing, and because his natural inclinations are hermetical, he
isn’t in a relationship. But he’s going to miss having Ruan’s kids so close by,
after years of being able to see them whenever he wanted, and have fun with
them. When people find out that he lives alone and has no wife or children they
ask does he have a dog or cat.
“I don’t want anything too dependent on me,” he says.
Voices from the past
Since word came out about Manchán’s new book, he’s heard
from some of those who were on that trip to Africa. It freaked him a little at
first, even though he’s changed everyone’s names, and the lawyers have
scrutinised the book. Because they now know it’s coming out, some of the
members want to have a reunion.
Manchán won’t go though.
It was a different time, a different life – and judging by
the book, there were guests at that party one would rather not bother with
again.
