The Motorcycle Diaries - Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Che Guevara is, to put it lightly, a polarizing figure. Though his deification on some parts of the left makes me a bit queasy given the repressions he oversaw—and to some extent directly imposed—on Cuba’s citizens, the countervailing vilification he receives from the right has always felt a little forced, as the exigencies of revolution and war seem to them acceptable, even laudable, when done by their side, and repugnant when done by others. Basically, Che is the ultimate optical illusion for political partisans: some see two faces chatting, others see a vase, but the pattern of light and shadow is in both cases identical.

But I’m not here to talk about Che Guevara the revolutionary, but Ernesto Guevara, author of a poignant memoir about his travels around South and Central America. It’s called The Motorcycle Diaries, but the eponymous motorcycle dies less than halfway through the book, and anyway it isn’t even really a motorcycle, but a regular bicycle with a jury-rigged motor attached (though come to think of it, putting a motor on a bicycle does make it a motorcycle in the most literal sense, so point to Che there, I guess).

Published nearly 30 years after his death, The Motorcycle Diaries was obviously released without Che’s knowledge, and it’s unclear to me whether he wrote his diary with the intention that anyone would ever read it. There is indeed no overwhelming impulse to apply narrative structure to the text, with passages recounting experiences episodically and often without the connective tissue of segues. A few of his letters to his parents are interspersed between entries. Yet there is undeniably a literary flourish to the work that suggests he hoped it to be read. I am always reluctant to judge the prose style of works read in translation, but I can at least say that Che utilized a surprising degree of lyricism, irony, and humour, giving depth to his more prosaic observations of life among the lower classes of South America. The humour especially surprised me, particularly its sly self-deprecation. I will remember the anecdote about the peaches for the rest of my life.

Also evident (and here the right wingers will roll their eyes and gag) was an undeniable empathy for the people he met. For nearly everyone he writes about, he does so with compassion and kindness, and there seems to be a sincere sorrow at the plight of the poorer folks he encounters. particularly the patients at one of the several leper colonies he visits. Whether this compassion was a genuine fuel for his revolutionary zeal or merely a pretense for later violence is something I’ll leave to others to debate, because frankly I don’t really care. Che was who he was and did what he did, and regardless of these things his writings show insight and talent.

The Ghost Road - Pat Barker

I approached The Ghost Road assuming it was a novel about the First World War, and indeed it is commonly billed that way, but I can’t help but feel that the descriptor is inapt, or at least incomplete. Certainly the Great War features prominently, both in the action presented and in the minds of the novel’s two protagonists, who see the conflagration through very different lenses. But at its heart, The Ghost Road feels more like a book about an era than an event, a sensation reinforced by the book’s regular jaunts outside of war-torn France and Belgium to other locales entirely.

The story’s two protagonists are Billy Prior, a working-class officer who feels driven to return to the field of battle despite mutiple medical deferrals, and William Rivers, a real-life psychoanalyst and ethnographer. Barker peppers her novel with a mixture of fictional and real characters, a method of verisimilitude evidently carried over from the earlier books in the series (The Ghost Road is the final book of a trilogy, the first two of whcih I have not read). Approaching the book without any real foreknowledge, I didn’t realize this fact right away, and was suprised in retrospect that some of the characters she’d mentioend were real people (it didn’t dawn on me until the afterword that Prior’s comrade Owen was actually the poet WIlfred Owen, though in my defence I don’t think she ever calls him by his full name).

The book’s prose is elegant and ornate, with plenty of strong images. It was also surprising in its sexual frankness, which again I’m sure would have been less unexpected if I’d read the first two books, or known more of Pat Barker’s book. Barker’s depiction of a bisexual man in that time and place was interesting, though the lewdness seemed layered on a bit thick at times. However, many war novels underplay the average soldier’s preoccupation with sex, so in a sense Barker’s frankness wa refreshing.

Though Prior’s trajectory brings him to Franc,e a good chunk of his narrative oocurs while back in England, giving a glimpse of World War 1 in a place where the fighting was not actively ranging, but the violence instead filtered in through bittersweet homecomings of crippled boys or letters with black bordered envelopes. We also venture further afield during Rivers’ regular recollections of his time in the Solomon Islands. The experience of the isalanders under British hegemony, and their relatioship with death. provides interesting counterpoint to the events of the war.

All told, I enjoyed the book, and will likely go back and read the earlier installments in the trilogy. Really, I probably hsould have done this first, but the Ghost ROad was the only one I had in my collection. Oh well.