Books in Brief: Halfway around the World

Halfway around the World, by Gavin Young (Random House, 473 pp., $16.50). One day a question occurred to Gavin Young. It was not a deep or particularly important question, but to a footloose man like himself it had possibilities: Could one, in this era of jet travel, still sail from Europe to the Orient on short-haul commercial shipping? Young might have had his answer in two weeks by calling around to booking offices, but how much nicer to see for himself. So, leaving wife and kids, off he went. This book records the journey in exhaustive detail. Little that crossed Young’s physical or mental path during sojourns on tubs plying the waters east of Suez escapes his busy pen. His digressions make the book seem overlong and also superficial—more so even, that is, than would be the case had he stuck to the facts of his rather pointless expedition. At one juncture he is being tossed like a rag doll in the cabin of a rattletrap steamer bound for the Maldives. Waves crash against the windows. Seamen cling for their lives to the taffrails. With the fate of all of them in doubt, Young lapses into a vignette about a Vietnamese soldier killed by a booby trap while on patrol. The man, whose name Young never learned, cried for home as he died. It doesn’t exactly advance the narrative he had embarked on, but Young witnessed it, and he remembered it, so it’s in the book. Still and all, Young does run across some interesting types. There is the Lebanese arrayed in diamonds and silks who chums it up with hoi polloi in tourist class en route but sniffs at them once the boat docks at Beirut. In a sticky terminal on the Persian Gulf, a son of India piteously requests that Young mail him back a blow-up nudie doll from London. Seeking enlightenment from friends from his days as a foreign correspondent, Young visits a Buddha-like gentleman of the press in Hong Kong. The man has spent a quarter of a century recording for the wire services the tortured events of the East. He is resigned, secure. The world, he pronounces, is one hell of a place. In a book padded with irrelevancies, the statement sounds like the wisdom of a philosopher. paul t. hornak