A Week In Books: Renewing the travel genre

Has travel writing reached the end of its road? Most signposts lead straight to that conclusion. All the tensions foreshadowed in the maverick career of Bruce Chatwin – between art and fact, reporting and inventing, sympathy and solipsism – have now blown the genre apart. In an era of mass transit, globalised culture and scant sympathy for lordly post-imperial explorers armed with a letter from the RGS, TravelLit lies in almost as many irreparable pieces as the far-flung ruins that its classic authors sought.

One fragment falls, with a sigh of relief, into undisguised fiction; one into therapeutic memoirs. Another shifts into heavyweight cultural or natural history; and yet another into the kind of high-concept, low-ambition farce that takes the voyager on a "zany" quest to meet the only Everton fan in Ecuador or to down every pint of Guinness in Micronesia.

Last year's most incisive work about journeys took the shape of Alain de Botton's sceptical (even stay-at-home) guide to The Art of Travel. Meanwhile, no book about a remote location began to match the panache and insight of Iain Sinclair's tramp around the M25, London Orbital. In a crisp valediction for Prospect, the writer Edward Marriott pronounces the last rites over the breezy back-packing "I". He advises us to get real with novels and history instead.

In general, I agree. Mostly, travel writing sounds dead on its feet, as lazy publishers allow enthusiasm to mask mediocrity – if not downright mendacity. Yet a return to first principles can correct flaws in a design. The world is still wide and – if not quite uncharted – then misunderstood enough to justify the occasional tough trip to a far place, rendered in honest prose by a receptive observer.

Aptly enough, a new book that does just that reports on life in a proverbial symbol of remoteness: Outer Mongolia. In Hearing Birds Fly (Little, Brown, £16.99), Louisa Waugh accounts for a year she spent as an English teacher in the westernmost corner of the Republic of Mongolia. (In 1989, the Mongolians staged their own velvet – or possibly felt-lined – revolution, and shook off Russian tutelage.) Waugh has no overriding private agenda; no Big Idea; no stylistic gimmick. She lives among the villagers of Tsengel in a felt-clad ger (tent), her "domed capsule of privacy"; gets to know the "outrageously generous" locals; and tries hard to share their taxing, nomadic lives. She understands, and sometimes misunderstands; takes part in festivals and rituals such as the wedding game in which "if one sex can guess the whereabouts of the hidden wedding ring, they get to thrash the other"; feels liberated, and accepted, and isolated, and (above all) cold, especially when plodding out to the communal trench toilet on a -30C winter "Morning from Hell". This book prunes travel writing back to its bare essentials, and the result – against the odds, against the current – shines with freshness and frankness. Her writing braces and uplifts like wind across these barren steppes.

Partly, it's gender that helps renew the genre. A woman alone, Waugh has to negotiate a role that no boys' own adventurers have prepared. This involves a lot of honesty, and no false heroics. She must struggle to show her self-sufficiency in this vodka-swilling, carnivorous patriarchy. Having proved her autonomy, she then (of course) feels far too solitary: "What I really wanted was to make love and to be loved." When the year ends, she's ready to leave and to close this "lonely, intimate and profound" chapter. Modest in its presentation (insultingly so, given Little, Brown's cheap paper), Hearing Birds Fly looks at first glance like the runt of a literary litter – an unloved whelp out of a tired old kennel. In theory, that should be the case. In practice, the little beast thrives. One good book can buck a trend.