Chasing the Monsoon

Alexander Frater is a charming companion and his journey is a really very interesting one - he recounts the feverish days waiting for the monsoon to relieve the heat of summer, and then follows its route as it advances through India, bringing its life-giving water and welcome fresh air. We learn an awful lot about India and its people and their preoccupations - it's a book where you finish it having FELT what you are reading, second only to going there yourself. Frater's a great writer, and here he's found an unexpected and interesting reason for his journey through India. But why is Beyond the Blue Horizon, his book about retracing the route of the first commercial aircraft, often flying boats, to make the journey from England to Australia, now out of print?

A splendid journey through India! (3/4 people found this helpful)

This is travel writing at its best. An imaginative theme, vivid descriptions, good variety. Frater has the gift of capturing the essence of the scene in a few well-chosen paragraphs.

An excellent and introspective tour of parts of lesser-known (2/2 people found this helpful)

This was a book which once opened one could not put down. It gave the 'feel' and 'smells' of india and the dewscriptive woriting was such that it took one back to the India one knew. I do not think the author ever intended to to create an indepth travelogue/history or a report on social affairs. I was disappointed at the shallowness of another reviewers criticism, ghut clearly no book will please all. However I am happy to redress the balance.

A Slating for Frater (1/6 people found this helpful)

The prospect of following the monsoon from Trivandrum to Cheerapunji in the company of a Sandy Frater was exciting. Anyone who knows India knows the centrality of these rains to the whole culture and the tension that builds prior to their coming. But rather like the Monsoon of 1987 I found this book a disappointment - which was a disappointment. This however says as much about what I like in a book as what I found in it.

Let me first of all complain about travel writing as a genre. I have gone on pretending to myself that I like travel writing when in fact I do not. What we have in Chasing the Monsoon is a long series of very brief human encounters - the longest with a taxi driver in Rajasthan. In travel writing we don't get underneath the skin of a character - not even, in a book like this, the writer himself (for isn't it nearly always a man). How then can we get under the skin of a nation ? What an easy way to make a living - travel around and make notes on the people you meet and then knock the notes into a book on your return. Certainly what he encounters is authentic - but too authentic, just totally typical of the experiences of anyone who travels in India.

For me there is something basically unsatisfying about travel writing unless the territory is really special or the writer is offering some special insight or there are some groovy shenanigans running in parallel. Charles Nicholl The Fruit Palace teaches you plenty about Colombia in a book about the authors ensnarement with the Cocaine industry. Although Frater peppers this story with second-hand meteorological knowledge this is presented in an a desultory fashion. Although his childhood was steeped in weather-lore one gets the impression that he has never made it his own. What is of secondary astonishment is that Frater offers no special insight into the culture or history of India herself. He makes up for this by quoting heavily from the newspapers that he picks up along the way - too easy pal !

But what of this journey to follow the Monsoon (the idea of chasing it must have come in retrospect for he gets to Bombay and Dehli before it !) ? His initial enthusiasm for following the monsoon seems to wear off as the book proceeds - in fact he gives up informing the reader of where it is and is not, focusing on its activities in the Delhi area. The fact is that he did not follow or chase the monsoon and really only saw the burst in Trivandrum. His aim soon becomes to get to Cheeripunji where the monsoon had arrived long before. You admire his persistence.

There was little in Frater's character to draw the reader in. One had the feeling that his resolve in the whole project was less than settled and that he remained mildly depressed throughout. It was a "cosy" book - a fact highlighted by unmemorable lines such as "Rain beat on the windows and the wind moaned in from the sea. It was very cosy." [page 91 bottom].

There is no worse condemnation of a book than to be positively reviewed by Melvin Bragg but that he could have described this book as an "exuberant rollercoaster" beggers belief. Clearly there are those will markedly different sensibilities to my own.

Alexander Frater

Reader Reviews:

An excellent journey through India (6/6 people found this helpful)

A splendid journey through India! (3/4 people found this helpful)

An excellent and introspective tour of parts of lesser-known (2/2 people found this helpful)

A Slating for Frater (1/6 people found this helpful)

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