Of all the fantastic authors I've come across this year, I think Damon Galgut has to rank as my most mind-blowing discovery.

There's something about the way he writes that is absolutely riveting. He just sweeps you along. And yet his writing has tremendous depth. I'm not totally sure how he does it.

In a Strange Room -- published in 2010, and read, in my audio-version, by the author -- is, on the surface, a travel book. Its three sections, linked only by the presence of the same narrator, all detail journeys, and Galgut's keen powers of observation offer the reader much that is of interest about life and landscape in Greece, Lesotho, Malawi, Tanzania, India, and so on. But the focus throughout is the people who move through those lives and landscapes alongside the narrator, and each section details a series of emotional challenges: We have rivalry, elusiveness, and imposition; desire, longing, and guilt; envy, loss, and grief...


Pictures from my first experience of India, 2005/6. Much less traumatic than the one described here...



Each section, for me, was more harrowing than its predecessor. The first, The Follower, recounts a story of travel companionship that didn't work out (and truly, Reiner sounds like the travel buddy from hell, all silence and power-play). The second, The Lover, is a requiem for a relationship that never came to fruition (after all the near misses, after the pursuit and the obsession, the beautiful Jerome dies in an accident). The third, The Guardian, is the searingly tragic tale of a suicide, in which the narrator rescues his mentally ill travelling-companion from one attempt on her life, only to hear later that she has later tried again, and succeeded. (And in this section in particular, as William Skidelsky aptly remarks: "Galgut spares no details and the whole episode, suspended between horror and comedy, is almost unbearably powerful.")

The narrative point of view alternates between "he" and "I". By the time Galgut writes The Promise, he has perfected the sliding-viewpoints technique to scintillating effect. In this case, I initially found the switching slightly disconcerting. Example-cum-explanation: "He gets to the ruins in the middle of the afternoon. I can't even remember now what they are... Looking back at him through time, I remember him remembering, and I am more present in the scene than he was. But memory has its own distances, in part he is me entirely, in part he is a stranger I am watching..."

But I got used to it, and it makes sense. The experiences of our traveller (he's a South African called Damon, and the stories are at least partly autobiographical) are being recalled by a somewhat older self, who sometimes can't remember exactly what "he", the younger man, said or did. In any case, the younger Damon often experiences a kind of dissociation -- as though he is looking at himself from a external vantage-point. Example: "It is incredible [at Victoria Falls] to see the volume and power of so much water endlessly dropping into the abyss, but part of him is elsewhere, somewhere higher up and to the right, looking down at an angle not only on the falls but on himself there, among the crowds."

I'm not sure how reliable our narrator is. We have no other points of view to compare him with -- except hearsay reports that Reiner, with whom he bitterly parted ways on a mountain odyssey in Lesotho, tells things rather differently. What we can say, however, is that Damon doesn't spare himself.





As well as the life-stories that we're following, the triptych offers us many insights into the experience of travel. There is the self-absorbed traveller, who constantly blocks out local sounds with earplugs; there are the complaining tourists, who have no conception of their own privilege; and there's the opportunistic traveller, who moonlights as a smuggler. There's the awkwardness of overhearing others' views of South Africa (which boil down -- in the polite version -- to "beautiful country, messed-up people"). There are the inevitable bad visa experiences (it takes Damon a while to backtrack on his overly assertive attitude at the border post where he arrives without the correct documentation). And there's the ever-present danger of losing your moorings: "Too much travelling and placelessness have put him outside everything, so that history happens elsewhere, it has nothing to do with him. He is only passing through."

In fact, backgrounding all the nitty-gritty of the journeys and the relationships is the impression of a traveller who's on the road because he wants to escape himself: "The truth is that he is not a traveller by nature, it is a state that has been forced on him by circumstance... He is hardly ever happy in the place where he is, something in him is already moving forward to the next place, and yet he is also never going towards something, but always away, away. This is a defect in his nature that travel has turned into a condition."



But that sense of being driven onwards is also integral to travel in some ways. As this excellent review by Natalie Bakopoulos perceptively puts it: "Traveling, in general, disorients. We are displaced from our normal locations, we are observing places that are not our own, and our minds constantly compare the new, foreign place with the familiar one. Like Rimbaud’s process of becoming a seer, the state of traveling might be a process by which we project toward the unknown by a derangement of the senses. To travel is to step into a sort of duality."

That was the point of the title, too, as I understood it. When you wake up "in a strange room", there's always that initial feeling of disorientation, which is both disturbing and exhilarating. If you're not feeling at least a bit uncomfortable when you travel, then you're not really travelling...

But Bakopoulos explains that the title is drawn from William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying: "In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep..." She continues: "Perhaps in a strange land you must empty yourself for travel."

And I wonder whether -- in what for all of us is a strange life, constantly twisting and turning, never predictable -- you must also empty yourself for writing.

Perhaps that's Galgut's secret.