I have lived in the region's capital city, Khabarovsk, for many weeks. I have been to the Amur River on a score of occasions. And I am able to say this forcefully because of something that the editor who assigned this review did not know: that the Primorye is an area of the faraway world that, by peculiar chance, I happen to know rather well. This windy beginning seems necessary just because John Vaillant's remarkable new book is an exercise in reportage from somewhere that is very, very far away indeed, and is, in addition, so extraordinary a tale as to positively demand a healthy dollop of skepticism.īecause John Vaillant, though telling of a place so far away, does not in any sense shade or colour his writings.
And who can blame them, really? Tall stories are the best, perhaps - so long as the reader know they're tall. They will make this event a tad more thrilling, that grass a little more green, those remarks a smidgen more dazzling, than if they were telling tales from just down the road. Maybe I wouldn't go so far as the late Geoffrey Moorhouse, who believed all travel writers, at heart, to be fibbers but from personal experience I know well that many writers, when separated from their readers by many thousands of miles and so less likely to be found out, will, as the saying has it, sex things up. I certainly am not the first to suggest that many who write about the world's farther corners succumb occasionally to the temptation to shade and colour their writings in a way that those who scribble closer to home can seldom afford to.
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