“˜Ugly pugnacious trolls’. That’s what Adrian Anthony Gill, better known as his byline A.A. Gill, once called the Welsh in a Sunday Times column. Gill, one of the most established travel writers in the world, has definitely left his razor-sharp satiric bite on various groups in the past, including animal rights activists for his written account of shooting a baboon to “˜see what it would feel like to kill someone’. In keeping with his idiosyncratic smugness, his latest anthology, A.A. Gill is Further Away Helping with Enquiries, has already managed to upset the East of England’s Norfolk county, whom he describes as being “˜the hernia on the end of England’.
Yet, say what you will about Gill, the man sure can write – invariably, effortlessly and somewhat frustratingly well – especially when considering the fact that he is a self-confessed dyslexic. His newest book is a handpicked collection of essays written over the last five years, most of which are taken from his columns for The Sunday Times, Tatler, Conde Nast Traveler and GQ. In this compilation of chapter-long stories, Gill sticks to his iconoclastic style, offering a fantasy indulgence read.
By separating the book into two neat slices – “˜Near’ and “˜Far’ – Gill replaces the more traditional travel book practice of gushing with deeply refreshing astute observations. In “˜Near’, there are delightfully descriptive antidotes from areas of Gill’s British homeland, interspersed with more personal essays such as his experience of fatherhood and his opinion on the Space Race. In “˜Far’, Gill guides us through a meandering narrative of foreign destinations such as the mummies of Sicily, the vintage motorcar fanatics of Bombay and dark December time in Stockholm. Throughout the two bisections, he walks next to us, his husky voice excavating the personality of each place.
Indeed, Further Away makes you feel as if you’re paging through Gill’s private notebook, where you learn things that would never appear on a travel brochure. Within the turn of a crisp white sheet, Gill transports you to Hyde Park, where he explains why it’s best to avoid the Rose Garden after dark, and further afar in Albania, he describes why Albanian students are “˜without peer, the worst-dressed kids in the Western world’. His skilled writing molds the mundane into pure magic, and by the time a chapter is done, you feel like you’ve just returned home with a bank of holiday memories.
Yet, besides creating wonderfully humorous travel stories, Gill also integrates his journalistic responsibility of social awareness. In between the outlandish dancing rituals of Morris men, he hauls you into the depths of poverty-stricken countries, asking you to face frighteningly real subject matter about the issues of malnutrition in Sudan, immigrant workers in Dubai and Haiti post the April 2010 earthquake. So while this quality makes the book less suitable for a light travel read, it certainly makes it a thought-provoking one.
Further Away is, simply put, first-person observational journalism at its finest. For that, I do feel Gill’s worthy of continuing with his somewhat controversial observations. Quite frankly, if he ever called me a troll, I’d be honoured.
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