Tag: Memoir

Going Solo – Roald Dahl

“Come quick, bwana! Come quick, come quick! A lion is carrying off the wife of the cook!”

A jolly good romp through the savannah is just the ticket, hey chaps!

Going Solo is the second memoir from celebrated (and in some circles reviled) children’s author Roald Dahl. It picks up where his first memoir, Boy, left off. I read Boy when I was young and, of all Dahl’s stories, the ones from this book have stayed with me the most. But for reasons I can’t recall, I never read its sequel.

When recently I found a copy of Going Solo in the shelf of a B&B, I thought I’d dip into it for a sample read. After a couple of chapters, I was so riveted I was hard pressed to stop myself slipping it into my bag on departure. So, on my next visit home, I plucked my parents’ copy from their bookshelf to continue the adventure.

Dahl is a unicorn of a memoirist: someone who has had more than his fair share of genuinely incredible life experiences and is a talented enough storyteller to do them justice.

Boy recounts a series of not-so-extraordinary tales from his childhood, but Dahl has a Sedaris-like talent for making the mundane enthralling (or maybe Sedaris has a Dahl-like talent, if we’re going chronologically). Tales of the sweet shop owner who would pick liquorice – and the occasional mouse – from the jar with filthy blackened fingers; of being forced to sit with bare buttocks on frosty toilet seats to warm them for the older boys at boarding school, are somehow wonderfully fun to read. In these tales of his youth, you can also clearly see the inspiration for many of the characters and events in his famous children’s books.

Looking back, I suspect at least a dash of creative licence in the telling of some of these tales, but the stories in Going Solo, assuming they are not totally fabricated, need no exaggeration.

Going Solo is told as a series of vignettes rather than a continuous narrative and covers the author’s time working with the Shell company in East Africa and his service as a fighter pilot with the RAF during the Second World War.

Sprinkled throughout are black and white photos, mostly taken by the author, and excerpts from letters back home to his mother, as well as maps, telegrams and documents like his flying log. This mix serves to round out the reading experience into a wonderful voyage to the past – like walking through a museum with the best tour guide ever.

In Africa, he tells of narrow escapes from deadly snakes with the help of an eccentric Scottish snake-whisperer. There’s the time a lion grabs the cook’s wife in its jaws and starts trotting off with her (since, miraculously, the cook’s wife escaped unharmed, I feel the quote at the top can still be used in good taste) and a story of Dahl’s native ‘house boy’ and friend who, upon hearing that his employer is soon to be at war with the Germans, takes matters into his own hands, in the style of his native warrior tribe.

With his signature talent for characterisation, Dahl describes the ‘completely dotty’ chaps and chapesses he spent his time with in and en route to Africa. While we might now look with much scepticism on the colonial project the author was part of, it made for a fascinating read – an insight into both the native and the colonial way of life.

The author’s own colonial self-awareness was beyond what I expected for his time. When his ‘boy’ and good friend, Mdisho, goes rogue based on a cultural misunderstanding the size of Everest, he writes:

“I refused to blame him for what he had done. He was a wild Mwanumwezi tribesman who had been moulded by us Europeans into the shape of a domestic servant, and now he had broken the mould.”

It’s great fun to read the stories in his native British wartime language. It’s not quite ‘bally ho, what what!’ but a believable version of that voice for which my main reference point is parody. It was a delight to feel like I was stepping into a past I’ve had little contact with, even through literature or film. While I have read many books from the 19^th century, the early-mid 20^th seems to be a bit of a blank spot in my reading vocabulary.

The author’s wartime stories are thrilling and harrowing in equal measures. The whole time, I couldn’t help but marvel and thank the fates that he made it back alive to not only tell this tale, but all the others that have made him a staple of children’s bookshelves.

Arriving in Greece fresh from a near-death experience and long recovery in hospital, he finds himself totally unprepared and untrained, flying among a squadron of fifteen fighter pilots and four bombers (a number that diminishes literally by the day) tasked with taking on a thousand German planes.

The young author takes it all in his stride, watching his fellow pilots fall out of the sky, shooting down German planes and knowing he is unlikely to make it through the week. ‘We weren’t afraid of anything’, he says of the group of young RAF pilots. Reading it ninety-odd years on, rugged up in my blanket, a world where this kind of daily brush with mortality was accepted without the bat of an eyelid was harder to imagine than a whiz popping giant.

In the context of recent controversies over this author – the attempted cleansing of his children’s books (removing words like ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’) and the general whiff of unsavouriness that seems to have swirled up around him (Philip Pullman, author of The Rose Field, has gone so far as to suggest that Dahl should be left to go out of print) – I was subconsciously looking for hints of this nasty character as I read. I found nothing I couldn’t like about this man.

Of course, in a memoir, one is the author of one’s own self-image, but it’s remarkable how nasty people can still give themselves away even with all the scrubbing tools at their disposal. The memoir was written more than forty years after the events, when Dahl was in his sixties. Still, in all his attitudes he appears warm, humble and open-minded.

The Roald Dahl of later years earned a bit of a reputation as an anti-Semite, and some quotes attributed to him certainly make that charge hard to defend.

Interestingly, the last story in Going Solo tells of meeting a Jewish refugee at a desolate aircraft base in Palestine, where he is hiding out with a school of Jewish orphans. The man speaks to him, somewhat cryptically, of his intention to set up a Jewish homeland. The author comments that as they spoke, he had no idea that the biggest massacre in human history was currently taking place in Germany.

It’s not impossible that some of the author’s less agreeable views were edited, or self-edited, out of this book, but all I can say is the Roald Dahl of both his memoirs is an utterly charming man. On whether this gives a complete account of his true character, I prefer to remain both ignorant and ambivalent.

I devoured this book. I knocked it over in a week, which is as fast as I can remember finishing a book in basically forever. It’s an easy and fun read, but fascinating and enlightening. For the first time in a while, I was not just enjoying reading time when I could snatch it but finding excuses to go to bed early and sit with it late into the night to read just a bit more. It was a treat worthy of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, and, like all the best treats, it left me wanting more.

July 12, 2026
The Places In Between – Rory Stewart

Audiobook narrated by the author

‘In many houses, the only piece of modern technology was a Kalashnikov, and the only global brand was Islam.‘

Every now and then you come across a book that makes you want to run down the streets, waving it in the face of everyone you pass.

It’s not that this is the most incredible book ever written in terms of its craft or the sublime beauty of its prose, although it’s certainly impressive. But I’m a sucker for a great story, potentially especially so for a great true story. Rory Stewart is a former British diplomat and politician and now co-host of The Rest Is Politics podcast. Something about the idea of an upper-class politician completing a journey worthy of the explorers of old, and actually writing a good book about it, is so unlikely that it makes this work even more intriguing.

I’m not generally a big reader of memoir or travel writing or narrative non-fiction—in fact, this might have been the first travel memoir I’ve ever read, and possibly my lack of familiarity with the genre contributed to my unexpected pleasure in devouring this book. My father-in-law, who has read many more intrepid travel stories, described it just as ‘okay’. He had better recommendations, which have been already lost to memory, though I’m sure I’ll find them in his bookshelf eventually (my ‘next shelf’ is now apparently extending into other people’s houses). In the meantime, I’m allowing myself to call this a must-read.

When I’ve occasionally tried my hand at keeping a travel journal, all I learned from the experience was how dull an amazing trip full of wonder and beauty can become when written down after the fact. Your holidays are kind of like your kids: not that interesting to other people. This is not that kind of travel memoir.

In The Places In Between, Rory Stewart narrates his solo trek through Afghanistan in 2002, during the war which his country was playing its part in waging within its borders. He sets off from Herat just weeks after the Taliban’s departure.

Following in the footsteps of Babur, the first emperor of Mughal India, Stewart seeks to re-tread this ancient path, walking every step of the way from Herat to Kabul in a straight line through the central mountains. No cheats: no car trips, no donkey rides, no camels, horses, planes or piggy backs. This takes him through perilous snow-covered mountains and remote villages completely disconnected from the outside world, even from the cities of Afghanistan itself—a route thought to be impossibly dangerous for anyone to attempt, let alone a Brit in wartime. Each night he finds a local family to stay with, relying on the region’s ancient tradition of hospitality.

Before arriving in Afghanistan, Stewart had walked in this style through much of Iran, India, Nepal and Pakistan, but that leg of the journey is only vaguely alluded to in this book. When and if he finally gets around to writing about it, I’ll be first in line at the bookshop.

Even a badly written book about this epic journey might be worth reading for its insights on the history of this place and the people who live lives completely unrecognisable to us in our globalised, internet-dominated world. Luckily for us, this is not a badly written book.

The prose is spare but neat, only on the odd occasion indulging in the luxury of a prosaic description of sunset over a mountain valley. For the most part, the author observes the people and cultural quirks he encounters without comment, judgement or reflection. He simply gives us a lens to look through, to observe this alien society and draw our own conclusions about the similarities and differences of people around the world, their values and assumptions, and some of the nuances our politicians may have been missing in their efforts to exterminate the Taliban. He observes societal norms and values vastly different from his own, but his role is that of a documentarian. He narrates as a fly on a wall that could turn sticky any moment.

Though Stewart’s plan was to undertake the entire journey alone, this immediately proves to be more difficult than he anticipated. On arrival, he is hauled before the Iranian security service and interrogated. He emerges with a mandatory escort of three Iranian guards, who make for interesting if not always likeable company. They lead the way nonchalantly through minefields, having forgotten where they put the mines; they can’t keep up with the pace and complain of blisters and brandish their guns at village children.

Eventually the author succeeds in paying them off, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief. He goes on alone until he picks up a loyal canine companion: a village dog who’s had his ears cut off and his teeth knocked out. He adopts the dog as a travelling companion, though when they start out poor Babur (named after the emperor) can barely manage the first few of the many kilometres his new drill sergeant has planned for the day. Use this resource at your discretion.

Stewart’s passion for the history and archaeology of the region make this a journey of discovery and enlightenment as well as a thrilling travel story. We get to see Afghanistan not just as it is today, but in an imagined ancient past as the narrator considers the movement of travellers along the Silk Road and other ancient trade routes and goes in search of lost wonders.

He discovers the Minaret of Jam, an ancient marvel in an area so remote that, at the time of his discovery, no one knew if it was still standing or had been blown up by the Taliban. He finds the Turquoise Mountain, the ancient city destroyed in the thirteenth century by the son of Gengis Khan, being plundered by locals for trinkets to sell on the road, in spite of its UNESCO status.

Having formerly served as a diplomat in Iraq, Stewart offers the occasional insight into the wars in the Middle East and we get a deeper understanding—too late, of course—of just how little anyone knew about what they were doing there. His telling of George Bush ‘dragging the Quran across the table with his unclean left hand as the Imam tries to force a smile’ is an image that pretty well sums this up.

For someone like me with very limited understanding of all the different incarnations of Islamic culture (as noted in The Satanic Verses) this was a fascinating portrait of a people completely unknown and perhaps unknowable to the liberal Western world.

Key among these differences is the willingness of so many poor, uneducated, disconnected rural villagers to take in, feed and shelter a foreigner and total stranger for the night. Can you imagine someone turning up at your house one night with a backpack and demanding hospitality? There’s a morally ambiguous dimension at work here, too, in that even by British standards, Stewart comes from money. As he notes, he is walking alone across the country carrying what for these villagers would be a life-altering sum of money, yet he’s asking them for food and board. And, as he also notes, he is never mugged or kidnapped or killed for his cash or possessions.

I feel I haven’t done justice to just how intrepid this journey was. Everybody knows, courtesy of The Lord of The Rings, that the mountain pass in winter is the worst possible route (in that case, apart from all the others; in Stewart’s case, just a plain stupid idea).

He is told over and again by people who should know that between snow, the Taliban, unpredictable and possibly violent locals, and wolves, he is unlikely to survive to tell the tale.

Over his journey he is offered help many times, offered lifts and assistance in ways that must have felt impossibly tempting. There’s something almost biblical about these temptations and refusals. Along his path he is threatened by the Taliban, attacked by villagers and stray dogs, suffers malnutrition and illness and nearly succumbs to the snow as he walks 35 kilometres per day through rugged mountain terrain. Still he walks on until, impossibly, he takes the final step into Kabul and completes his quest.

The Places In Between has everything a good story needs: adventure, danger, impossible obstacles overcome, a worthy protagonist and a loyal sidekick, and some fascinating side characters. Stewart does an excellent job narrating the audiobook in a voice whose poshness belies the harsh extremes of his journey.

Between his familiarity with the local languages, history and culture, his experience as a diplomat, his desire to attempt such an insane venture and his sheer determination and lack of self-preservation, Stewart is one of very few people who could have completed this journey at all, let alone written about it so eloquently—which makes this book all the more precious.

Most of all, I found it a fascinating portrait of how the other half lives. It’s easy to forget that the world is not solely composed of the liberal democratic globalised secular society we know. There is another world, where people spend their entire lives two days’ walk from anywhere else, where women are not seen in public, where people open their homes to strangers and throw rocks at dogs. Where society is driven not by the vain pursuit of equality, but by the preservation of hierarchy: where you have to know your place in the pecking order before you sit down to dinner. And it’s not by any means one unified society depicted here; at one point the author is warned of the ‘savages’ in the Hazara villages, only to find that the main point of difference seems to be that women are allowed in the presence of strange men.

I was reminded strongly of Wittgenstein’s lion, who, even if he could speak, we still would not understand. We live in a world now where we carry translators in our pockets. We can touch and influence and speak to people in distant lands. But for all our constant march toward connectedness, there are people pushing just as hard in the other direction—perhaps recognising that the power to drop bombs on another civilisation may long precede the power to comprehend it.

April 20, 2026
Why The Next Shelf?

There are three scents in the world that I can’t get enough of: forests, where damp compost mingles with new flowers and eucalypt; churches, with their candlewax and incense; and the smell of a book.

The first thing I do when I start a new book is open it and smell the pages. The older and more loved the book, the better. I started doing this with my Harry Potter books when I was young and re-reading them for the 15th time.

It was a grounding, calming action that immediately began the transition between worlds, the descent through the portal opened up within the page, absorbing me into the ink. The walls around me would shimmer and sway and disappear and in their place would be a castle, a forest glade, a distant planet, a land far far away.

Every day I look at my bookshelf and I get excited about all the books I’m yet to read and I grieve the ones I worry I’ll never get to. I’m filled with angst about the brevity of life and the vastness of the collection of books I want to read – including the ones I don’t yet or may never even know about.

Perhaps a week after I first drafted the above paragraphs about the smell of books, I had the pleasure of seeing Eddie Perfect’s stage rendition of Beetlejuice in Melbourne. The production contains one of my favourite-ever lines:

There are two types of people in this world: new-car-smell people, and old-book-smell people. We are old-book-smell people!

I guess I don’t need to elaborate on which camp I sit in.

Over the course of my writing ‘career’, many people have told me, ‘you shouldn’t write for other people – just write for yourself’.

I don’t hold with this advice in general. Of course, if you want to write purely to immerse yourself in the experience, that’s a wonderful thing. But don’t kid yourself (unless you’re a very, very special unicorn) that anyone is ever going to want to read your journal.

It seems sensible to me that if you want your work to be read, you need to write it with the audience in mind. On the other hand, if you’re writing for enjoyment or self-therapy, write with only your own goal in mind.

For the most part, I prefer to write things that I think might eventually be read by other people – even if they never are, I get more satisfaction from thinking that one day my work might provide interest or enjoyment to others (ironically, most of my creative writing has never seen the light outside my window).

The Next Shelf is a different project, one that is really an exercise in self-indulgence. I really just want to write down my thoughts about the books I am reading and use it as a way to continually practise and develop my writing – and reading – craft, albeit within a narrow format.

I don’t expect that anyone else will want to read this blog, but if, like me, you are obsessed with books and find yourself short of opportunities to discuss books with others who have read the same ones, or if you’re looking for recommendations (or anti-recommendations) then you might perhaps find some value here and I would welcome the company.

Starting this blog at a time when I am both searching for employment and trying to break into freelance writing, rejections and judgements of being ‘not good enough’ form such a core of my daily experience that it’s refreshing to create a space for myself where there is zero intention or expectation of pleasing anyone else and any number of readers above zero will be counted as a gift.

So there it is: this is a place for me to have a one-way discussion about books, although I will be surprised and delighted by any interaction via comments with further thoughts, disagreement or suggestions from anyone with the interest and time to follow along.

August 19, 2025