Day 2,260, Quasi-Quarantine: "Journey Without Maps" Documents A Harrowing Venture Through Africa's Interior

“Later I got used to not caring a damn, just to walking and staying put when I had walked far enough, at some village of which I didn’t know the name, to letting myself drift with Africa.”

Graham Greene's account of a four-week, head-long scamper through the interior of Liberia stands as a strong commentary on the impacts of colonialism in early-20th-century Africa. He and his retinue -- including his companion, a cousin he barely mentions -- covered some 350 miles on foot, braving a number of physical and cultural dangers.

“ … The peculiarly Protestant characteristic of combining martyrdom with absurdity.”

The author continuously put his health and safety at risk in "Journey Without Maps," but the intent of his trek was often missing. He seemed bent on rushing as fast as possible through the experience much of the time, causing a reader to wonder what he had hoped to achieve.

“I felt crazy to be here in the middle of Liberia when everything I knew intimately was European. It was like a bad dream. I couldn’t remember why I had come.”

I was a big fan of Greene's work in "The Quiet American," and this certainly represents a massive departure from that style. Perhaps an element of this tale that could have benefited from more exploration was the impact of the journey on his mental state.

“Today our world seems peculiarly susceptible to brutality. There is a touch of nostalgia in the pleasure we take in gangster novels, in characters who have so agreeably simplified their emotions that they have begun living again at a level below the cerebral.”

Greene credits the ordeal for rekindling his love of life, despite latter-life admissions that it was a reckless endeavor. His interactions with villagers are perhaps the best part of the book -- especially when they serve to highlight the ways in which the natives are being taken advantage of by his countrymen and other Europeans.

“A child was crying in a tenement not far from the Lord Warden, the wail of a child too young to speak, too young to have learnt what the dark may conceal in the way of lust and murder, crying for no intelligible reason but because it still possessed the ancestral fear, the devil was dancing in its sleep.”