The Changing Sky: Travels of a Novelist

The Changing Sky is an early collection of articles written on travel, published in 1959. My edition is the Eland paperback published in 1984, with a specific note saying the photographs from the original edition have been lost and the imperfect reproductions used in this reissue have been used in the belief that these would be appreciated by readers more than none at all! They are fairly poor quality, but not terrible and certainly are better than none!

A somewhat eclectic collection covering far more than travel - in fact notwithstanding being advised in the introduction that for Lewis travel came before writing - I would say they don't so much focus on travel for travels sake, but take in all manner of topics which Lewis would have encountered while he travelled to these places. Most of these articles have been published in New Yorker, Sunday Times or New Statesman, and have specifically not been brought up to date when published.

In Ghana Lewis focuses on important persons he meets; in Liberia under President Tubman he takes some inspiration from Graham Greene; a brief visit to Belize, a season of writing in Guatemala; another Guatemalan chapter on the death of dictator Castillo Armas a man the USA supported in his position; pre-Castro Cuba; another US supported Dictator, this time in the Dominican Republic; a military story in Vietnam; a festival in Laos; the Rangoon Express, in Myanmar; Lewis's five summers spent in Ibiza before it became a playground for holidaying Brits, when it was occupied largely by aging fishermen; a bull fight in Spain. There were other stories from Goa, Haiti and Algeria.

Some of these were very good, read well and were relevant. Others were dated and some were a bit stilted and on topics of marginal interest to me. A mixed bag.

3 stars.