The Picador Book of Journeys. Robyn Davidson. Picador. £16 UK, HB.

Pat Boran

'To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive,' wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, 120 years ago now, an observation which is clearly true if one is going to the dentist but which also helps to explain why travel books take up ever greater portions of shelf space in contemporary bookshops.

That readers like to travel, imaginatively, is of course one of the reasons why good story-telling has such an important place in a vibrant culture. That they usually prefer to travel in the company of one of their own, an Irish author writing about Africa, for example, rather than a native African writing about her own place, is perhaps a little more difficult to understand.

Then again, if what we are after is the experience of travelling, rather than that of arriving, perhaps the first-person account of a fellow outsider comes closer to re-creating this. We may be interested in 'a literature to accommodate a longing for the exotic, in an increasingly homogenized and trivialized world,' as Robyn Davidson defines the genre in her introduction to this exceptional anthology, but we do like to maintain our otherness, at least most of the time.

What is far less obvious, however, is how the vast majority of contemporary travel writing continues to get away with selling a version of the world made popular at least a century before Stevenson. We, the readers, venture out into the world like so many Victorian explorers, amused or repelled by the antics of the natives, despite the fact that, in most contemporary European cities, the cousins of those same natives are living up the road or on council estates we would never think of visiting. 'It's as if the genre,' Davidson writes, 'has not caught up with the post-colonial reality from which it springs.'

When it comes to women travel writers, Davidson is equally incisive. Where men have long had the freedom to set off on the world tour, women have had all sorts of additional obstacles to overcome, the great majority having to wait 'to reach an age when their sex was no longer so desirable, when they would become, as it were, honorary men.'

Davidson's third and main point, and the raison-d'etre of this anthology, is the fact that much contemporary travel writing is the work of professionals, people who are paid or commissioned to go 'into the field' and report back. The day-to-day experience of such people is, however, often in stark contrast to the lives of their subjects (colonial echo intended) who cannot usually reach for their mobile phones or jump into their jeeps when the going gets rough or the life settles into dull routine.

With this in mind, Davidson, who once trekked across Australia with only camels for companions, redefines travel writing as work which is driven by an 'inner compulsion'. Journeys with purposes other than holidaying or book-making are what she is after, and instead of travellers disconnectedly traversing landscapes we get all sorts of people in all sorts of situations, and emotional states, truly engaged in inner as well as outer explorations.

One of the most striking examples of this 'literature of movement' is an extraordinary extract from the Memoirs of Hector Berlioz. In this short piece, the reader takes a coach trip from Florence in the company of the great composer who is variously engaged in work on his Symphonie fantastique and tortured by jealousy and 'sheer rage' at his betrayal by a lover. 'I must at once proceed to Paris, and kill two guilty women and an innocent man,' he confides in his notebook, the presence of two loaded pistols on his lap certainly helping to focus the reader's attention.

Not all of the pieces are as dramatic, but each in its way leads to the kind of revelation so often absent in work without real context, real purpose. When Bruce Chatwin visits the widowed Nadezhda Mandelstam in her sick bed, she passes over the first two of his gifts (Bollinger champagne and cheap thrillers) for the third, suggested to him by a friend. Her simple response tells a whole life story. 'Marmalade,' she says, 'it is my childhood.'

And when Doris Lessing returns to Zimbawbe after an absence of half a lifetime, what strikes her most is the absence of game, the comparative silence of the vastly depopulated bush. 'Once, the dawn chorus hurt the ears Being in the bush was to be with animals, one of them.'

The absences known only to locals, or return visitors, and the details noticed only by those passionately engaged in the world and aware of its history, are everywhere in this wonderful, constantly surprising book which, while it travels across continents and timelines, is never afraid to arrive at the truth.

© copyright Pat Boran