In 1935 Greene, thirty and with no relevant experience whatsoever, walked across the interior of Liberia with his twenty-three-year-old cousin Barbara, a cook, and a line of carriers, on a route where the map said nothing but Cannibals. Four weeks on foot through villages nobody outside had written about, sick most of the way, and increasingly convinced he was traveling backward in time toward something he recognized. That’s the book’s real subject — he keeps cutting from Liberia to his own English childhood and his psychoanalysis at sixteen. Uncomfortable in places and honest about his own condescension, and the fever passage near the end is extraordinary.
Journey Without Maps