I posted this review elsewhere but enjoyed writing it so didn't want to lose it
The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow and The Well at the World’s End.
A.J. Mackinnon.
While not children’s literature I thought these books would probably find an appreciative audience amongst a group of fans of works such as the Swallows and Amazons series, Three Men in a Boat, and the Iain and Sovra stories.
Mackinnon is in many ways running away from being a modern grownup in favour of having adventures; obviously, from my choice of comparison titles, ones with boats and always displaying a good sense of humour.
In the first title, Mackinnon chucks in a job as a drama teacher somewhere in the UK and runs away with a dinghy. He plans a few days or weeks sailing, but the weeks turn into months and he slowly makes his way from North Wales to the Black Sea in a tiny little mirror dinghy. Like Ian and Sovra he tends towards accidental exploits that make observers chuckle (and probably caused his parents no end of gray hairs) even while he recalls more competent literary predecessors like John or Nancy (and camps in the style of Jerome – ie, at any opportunity he picks a convivial pub, hotel or even hostel instead of a sleeping bag in the misty damp, outside by the riverbank). In many ways an “old fashioned” story his travelogue is more about his own stupidity and the endless kindness of the strangers who helped him along the way than the finer details of his journey.
The companion title (published later but I think mostly written earlier) is about his journey from Australia to Iona in northern Scotland without using regular scheduled air transport. Travelling with seasonal yachties from New Zealand to Australia, to Indonesia and finally Singapore Mackinnon’s random travels in order to get to the other side of the world without getting airborne lead to more happy accidents and funny but keen observations of human behaviour from his younger self. His misadventures in Laos are akin to any Enid Blyton or Willard Price adventures in colonialism but he never does lose that sense of wonder about how lovely most people are to the stranger among them. Does he eventually make it? When you read about how he arrived in Egypt you start to believe in idiots luck!
When I started Jack de Crow I was worried that the humour might pale. Hasn’t the naïve but intelligent traveller with a literary quote for every occasion already been done to death? Who needs another memoir about following in the footsteps of the Swallows in the Goblin? Surely the English have already overdone their quota of stranger in a strange land type stories? Yet Mackinnon (an Aussie British hybrid) seems to manage to offer up a version encompassing all of these for the modern reader, he has a delightful helping of eccentricity and utter delight in his travels and travails.
A pair of books I can thoroughly recommend- although if you pick up the same editions I did make sure you dig out your reading glasses as the print is crazy tiny!
