Great comic set-pieces in literature are usually carefully constructed and well-timed. So it is when Kenneth Widmerpool in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (a character clearly based on Shakespeare’s Malvolio in Twelfth Night) has a shaker of sugar emptied over his head, or when in Evelyn Waugh’s letters he misreads instructions and explodes 10 times the intended amount of dynamite, bringing down the roof of half a house, including that of a toilet on which someone is sitting (luckily without fatal results).
Elsewhere the comedy is verbal, as when Shakespeare’s Hamlet says the reason his mother’s marriage followed so soon after his father’s funeral was “Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral baked meats did coldly (i.e. served cold) furnish forth the marriage tables.”
By contrast, I was only half-way through reading Michael Gibb’s A Korean Odyssey: Island Hopping in Choppy Waters that I realized he was aiming for comedy at all.
“If any guesthouse in South Korea commands a finer view, I’m a bowl of kimchi,” he remarks. Elsewhere he asserts that if something else is true he must be a banana.
Some of the classics among comic travel books penned by Englishmen are A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby (1958) and the three books by Redmond O’Hanlon about treks through tropical jungles — Into the Heart of Borneo (1984), In Trouble Again (1988) and Congo Journey (1996). All four are both erudite and hilarious.
Gibb is an Englishman resident these days in Hong Kong but who lived for some time in South Korea, working as an editor and journalist, and also as a TV compere. He wrote a book about one particular suburb of Seoul, A Slow Walk through Jeong-Dong, in 2011, and then felt the urge to return and investigate the country’s off-shore islands, traveling almost entirely by ferry, though occasionally by bus as well.
These islands are not much visited by tourists, and it isn’t hard to see why. For the first half of the book the scene is generally of grey skies, brutal waves and ugly buildings with a history of bombardment, sometimes accidental, in the on-going conflict between the two Koreas. The young have all left, and the old are bent double from a lifetime of carrying heavy loads and battling the relentless winds.
It’s true that Michael Gibb has done his homework and includes pocket-sized accounts of historical events where relevant, but his skills as a comedian certainly need some work if they’re not to be abandoned altogether.
Of course, with no other foreign visitors in sight, and such Korean travelers as there are accustomed to going around in groups and pitying anyone like Gibb who’s traveling alone, the opportunity for comedy of a sort is ready-made. What’s missing is variety.
In the event I got rather tired of the shabby hotel rooms with their damp, suspiciously stained sheets, the unappetizing food and the ferry cabins with nothing to lie on other than the floor. Gibb must have sometimes wondered why he embarked on the trip in the first place.
The author reckons he visited 30 islands, not all featured in this book, and taken “at least 60 ferry trips.” He ends by going to an island called Silmi, site of some Cold War confrontations, this time with his wife, Ah Jin, and 11-year-old daughter, Bori. He contemplates the transformation that has overtaken South Korea since then.
“Its companies, technologies, brands, football players, pop stars and movie directors are globally recognized,” he writes. “It’s grown wealthy and influential to an extent I could not have imagined.”
The islands, however, tell a different tale — of depopulation and a slide into relative obscurity. Gibb clearly saw them while something of their old character remained.
He visits an island beloved of bird-watchers, Eocheong, and manages to identify one, a seagull. And he goes to another, Dokdo Island, known as Takeshima in Japan, little more than a collection of spiky black rocks, claimed by both countries.
But I was getting rather weary of the combination of these bleak islands and their rough weather and the sometimes mundane interests of my guide, good-natured though he always appeared to be. My having flu didn’t help.
Then I had a brain-wave. I would ask the opinion of an extremely well-read and well-informed friend who I knew had read the book already. What did he think? [Editor's note: The friend is the publisher of Camphor Press, which published this book.]
His reply was a revelation. This was the best English-language travelogue on South Korea ever written, he said. The leader in the field was generally held to be Simon Winchester’s Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles (1988). I reviewed this in the South China Morning Post and defined his good-natured formality as resembling the tone of “a captain of the second eleven.”
My colleague also reviewed it and concluded “Winchester is not a boring writer. Think of a good-natured, occasionally lecherous tour guide.”
As for Michael Gibb, he concludes he is “a more likeable author. Unlike Winchester, he doesn’t describe every woman he sees in terms of attractiveness. And he’s more reliable and balanced when it comes to information. Gibb’s frame (traveling around the islands) is not done merely to hang narrative on, but from a genuine interest in islands, ferries and Korea … The time frame of the different seasons is good too.
“I like the writing. As with a lot of humor, his is hit and miss, but it does serve a purpose. The self-deprecation gives him some leeway to make fun of or criticize the locals (though this is done in a gentle manner). These days readers are sensitive to white men making fun of local people.”
All in all, then, maybe I missed Gibb’s tone of voice. He certainly is self-deprecating, but the reader isn’t obliged to take this at face value.
So there you have it — two contrasting views, mine tentative, my friend’s determined and confident. As I cough over my computer I feel inclined to opt for my friend’s.
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