The making of a professional

All the clichés are true: travel refreshes the taste for living; it brightens the jaded mind, it stimulates and deludes. The border that is crossed in leaving the familiar behind is the same one whether the journey is travel at its most serious — on perhaps the Terra Nova or the Endurance — or a cut-price trek to the fun palaces of Florida or the Costa del Sol. And equally for the heroic explorer and the three-week tripper there is the risk that escape may turn out to be the worst journey in the world — a hazard that is not, for either, an element in adventure’s allure. But when everything goes well, when disaster has been successfully negotiated or chance has been protective, the tonic of change is sweet no matter how it has come about.

There’s a quirk in all this, though, when the traveller, bold or humble in his ambitions, happens to be a novelist.