William Atkins (1)

I read stories, a collage of stories if you like, but I wasn’t sure if they would create a bigger picture, something more than their passing impression.
Louise Michel took part in the 1870 Paris Commune revolt against the restored monarchy and was exiled from Paris to New Caledonia (Pacific) in 1873. The island had been occupied by the Kanaks until French colonialism used the island as a penal colony, gradually moving the Kanaks off their land, claiming it as “owned” by the colonists. Atkins visits in 2018 when a referendum is being held as to whether New Caledonia will become independent from France, doomed as the French colonists now outnumber the original Kanaks.
Dinizulu kaCetshwayo was exiled from his kingdom of Zululand to St Helena (Atlantic) in 1890, after resisting the British (and Boer) encroachment of his country. When he returned to Africa, Zululand had been partitioned into smaller kingdoms, and when resistance to the British appropriation of land arose, he was held responsible and exiled within South Africa.
Lev Shternberg was exiled for being a socialist agitator from Moscow to Sakhalin (in the Sea of Okhotsk, Northern Pacific) in 1889. He studied the customs of the indigenous Nivkh people, which formed the basis for his ethnographic studies.
Atkins travels to all three places of exile, which all remain remote, and provides us with his impressions and descriptions of his chance encounters, trying to get closer to feelings his subjects must have felt. These are interesting and the strongest part of the book for me.
These nineteenth century political exiles have differing responses to their exile, although they all physically survive to return to their original homes, although these places have changed.
Overall, an interesting read, but impressionistic, a collage allowing you to come to your own conclusions about exile, although Atkins indicates his own views. The book is top and tailed by broader thoughts about modern migrants, but although well meaning, these sections are dislocated from the main discussion of exiles, weakening the book.

One way of looking at this book is as a collection of stories pieced together, in the field, from lives shattered by exile. But in making the three journeys at its heart, I set out as a biographer only in a limited sense. It was less the life's course I was interested in tracing than the cracks in that life set off by the experience of exile. As I travelled I saw how those cracks intruded, continued to intrude, deep into the lives of others. The people I encountered, the living and the dead, often turned out to be exiles themselves, of one sort or another, sometimes yearning for a belonging that eluded them, sometimes living at peace with their state of unbelonging.… (altro)

The first half of this book is quite good; the author travels to various Old World deserts and relates his experiences, integrated with the accounts of previous travellers. There is little adventure, danger, or erring-do involved; he is rarely outside a vehicle or without a local guide. He kinda sorta gets lost a couple of times, finds riffling through the day's photographs that he was standing near a deadly Great Brown snake, and is rattled away from a waterhole in the Arizona desert, and that's about it, though in his literature reviews there is quite a bit more calamity. The book leaves a sour taste, though, as it collapses in its last stages in two deserts of America, in which he carps endlessly about US border control policy and describes the hijinks at the Burning Man Festival, a rock festival without the rock. The final chapter rallies only a little, as he visits the monasteries of Egypt's Eastern Desert and offers us a deep dive into the lives of the Desert Fathers. The book is never less than well-written, but these are not topics one would want or expect from a book purporting to be about deserts.… (altro)