Chasing the Devil by Tim Butcher

One of my favorite genres is the literature of travel—that idiosyncratic blend of reporting, history, and personal rumination that has always been such a strong tradition in England. We have excellent travel magazines, and some of our best writers contribute to them; but, apart from Paul Theroux (who lived in England for so long that he hardly counts as American), we rely largely on imports to show us how the thing is done. D.H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia; Evelyn Waugh’s Mediterranean Journal; E.M. Forster’s Alexandria: A History and Guide: virtually every English writer of note, going back to Boswell and Dickens, has contributed a volume to the travel bookshelf. The impulse to leave home—and write about it—is in their blood.

These are the amateurs of the form, canonical English writers roaming the globe. But there has always been a robust line of professionals for whom travel literature is their chosen form: Wilfrid Thesiger, Freya Stark, Bruce Chatwin, Norman Douglas. Again, a long shelf.

Tim Butcher, whose Chasing the Devil we’ve just published, belongs to the latter—though in the end, like all great writers, he eludes classification. Subtitled A Journey Through Sub-Saharan Africa in the Footsteps of Graham Greene, it chronicles, with unnerving vividness, his trek—mostly on foot—through the jungles of Liberia. Like Redmond O’Hanlon’s In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon—the title tells the story—Chasing the Devil is an account of a trip to hell. It even has a touch of our American master of misadventure Hunter Thompson’s “fear and loathing.”

Butcher, whose previous book Blood River was a bestseller in the UK, here returns to the continent he chronicled in following the legendary explorer H.M. Stanley’s perilous journey through the Congo; only this time he’s ventured even deeper into the Conradian Heart of Darkness. His nerve-rending encounters with witch doctors, crazed mercenaries, forgotten missionaries, and other human apparitions will both thrill you and make you glad you stayed home.

Its early fans are numerous and prominent. Anthony Bourdain lauds Butcher’s book “amazing as history, as anthropology, as a ripping yarn,” and Archbishop Tutu calls it “an inspirational account of humanity’s wonderful spirit to survive.” Paul Theroux, who should know, gives Chasing the Devil the highest plaudit of all: in his view, Butcher “in many ways goes deeper than Greene”—and deeper than that few want to go.