Chasing the Greene

I, Melachi ibn Amillar, being of unsound mind and body, did read Tim Butcher's Chasing the Devil, on the beach in Cuba in April 2013, having previously read his book about the Congo (in preparation for my forthcoming trip across Africa). Chasing the Devil deals with a long walk through the forest in Liberia. In short, he takes a bus to a forest, and walks each day along forest tracks to the next village, accompanied by a young man from Oxford and a local guide, while another guide takes his luggage there by motorbike on a normal road. Why does Mr Butcher do this? Well, he is following the footsteps of a certain Graham Greene, and he also says he feels he should spend more time in Liberia because he did not return to it when there was a war on. Or something like that. Now, I know nothing about this Graham Greene other than what I can derive from Mr Butcher's book, namely that he was a towering figure of 20th century English literature (which I rather doubt, or I or someone I know would surely have read something by him), that he liked seediness (no interesting evidence of this is given), and that he worked for British Intelligence, but later (though one suspects this was only because they were short of staff during the war). In all, I am not convinced that Mr Greene's trip in the 1930s is much more worthy than Mr Butcher's in the 2000s. The structural flaw of the book, compared to his Blood River, is this general pointlessness. The author seems worrying well connected, and the problems he encounters are of his own making. Anyway, in the course of his very readable account he gives a history of the region and its people, and this is certainly more interesting than reading roughly the same stuff in any guidebook.  He is again struck by the penchant of the Africans to fail to develop, even when not colonised, and he tentatively ascribes this to the tendency of tribalism to move at the pace of its slowest member. Maybe. But I liked this book, though I think I would have preferred a Willard Price adventure.