Before tourism there was travel,” wrote the critic Paul Fussell, “and before travel there was exploration.” This statement, from Fussell’s Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (1980), seems uncontroversial, even banal. But he didn’t mean merely that exploration was a precondition for travel, and travel for tourism. Rather, he meant that travel was all but dead, and that the ashes of exploration had been scattered to the four winds: “Because travel is hardly possible anymore, an inquiry into the nature of travel and travel writing between the wars will resemble a threnody, and I’m afraid that a consideration of the tourism that apes it will be like a satire.”
It’s possible to read this part of Fussell’s critique as satire with a straight face, but nevertheless, it caused some offense. In The New York Times, Jonathan Raban called Abroad’s travel-is-dead thesis “bad-tempered nonsense,” supported by “contradictory complaints,” and stolen from Evelyn Waugh at that. When Fussell passed away in May, the Times’s obituary quoted from Raban’s review, as if to say—with apologies to the old gag about Nietzsche and God—that, though Fussell may be dead, travel lives. Yes, travel lives. That will come as no surprise to those who recognized and wrestled with Fussell’s hyperbole. Yet if travel is endangered, be it by tourism or technology, what of the travel novel?
Fussell’s distinction between travel and tourism applies, it turns out, to books as well. Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo—whose subtitle, State
