Ones Company - A Journey To China

One’s Company: A Journey to China (1935) by Peter Fleming is travel writing from an age when journeys still looked like journeys, maps had blanker edges, and a British writer could set off across half the world with a notebook, a sharp eye, and a tone of mild amusement at almost everything, including himself.

Fleming’s account of travelling to China in the early 1930s has all the ingredients one hopes for in interwar travel writing: distance, discomfort, politics, odd encounters, fine observation, and the occasional sense that the author is both fascinated and faintly entertained by the whole performance. It is not a guidebook, and it is certainly not a modern piece of travel journalism with “top ten things to do” cheerfully stapled to the front. It is a proper journey, written by someone who knows how to turn movement, uncertainty, and inconvenience into prose.

China, as Fleming encounters it here, is not simplified into postcard scenery. It is complicated, unsettled, intriguing, and often difficult to read. That is part of the book’s appeal. Fleming writes with the cool, witty assurance of his period, but also with enough curiosity to keep the whole thing alive. He notices people, places, delays, absurdities, and the strange little moments that make travel writing more than merely travelling in print.

Condition-wise, this is a good copy as sold by Crappy Old Books. It shows the expected signs of age and use, because any copy of a 1935 travel book that has made it this far without acquiring a little character would be suspiciously well behaved. It remains a solid, readable volume, with the sort of period presence that makes older Jonathan Cape books so pleasing on the shelf.

A very appealing piece of 1930s travel writing for readers who like their journeys long, their authors dry, their history slightly dusty, and their books from a time when going to China was not a content opportunity but an undertaking.

Keep browsing: See more Travel books Other books by Peter Fleming