A Year of Space. A Chapter in Autobiography.

by Eric Linklater

A year of adventurous and arduous travel, during which Mr Linklater went to observe the war in Korea and journeyed to Australia and New Zealand, in the early 1950's.

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel

273 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

Eric Robert Russell Linklater was a Welsh-born Scottish writer of novels and short stories, military history, and travel books. For The Wind on the Moon, a children's fantasy novel, he won the 1944 Carnegie Medal from the Library Association for the year's best children's book by a British subject.

Reviews

[jessica ljung · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed this view into one year in the life of Eric Linklater, a distant relative who made it big as a writer in Scotland. The books starts with him sitting in a hotel in Stockholm, getting persuaded to cover the war in Korea. From there his year of travelling continue to countires including Japan, Singapore and Australia.

[David Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

I often picked up this book thinking from the title that it might have been some reminiscences of a NASA bigwig. Written as it was, in 1952, made this unlikely but it deserves to be read as a travelogue. The author, a writer, lives in Scotland, having been a medical student he became a war correspondent and then a writer. He decided that this was so arduous he should take a holiday. Sitting in a hotel in Sweden he is persuaded to travel to Korea in order to observe the ongoing war and thence to New Zealand in order to give a series of lectures. What follows is an amusing and clear-headed account of his travels and travails. Moments of necessary idleness allow him to reminisce about his own reading habits even as he bounces about in flying boats and suffers from severe dehydration. His views on the British colonisation of the pink bits of the map are of the time and it seems that there is nowhere so remote or uninhabitable for there to be a district commissioner or missionary to set up camp. The writing is a sheer joy although Linklater is at pains to point out how gruelling he finds the process when he'd rather be fishing. He still manages to net a few fish and the crew of a helicopter which inadvertently ditches in his loch, substantially increasing the average weight of his catch!
In Australia, "I found accommodation in an hotel whose public apartments consisted of a dining room and a lobby which looked like a stage set that had been designed for comedy. There were four doors and a staircase, there were some tables and chairs downstage, and in the left rear stood a quarter circle of office desk behind which youths and maidens in the employment of the hotel loudly flirted. I sat there drinking bad whisky and reading Great Expectations, and a drunk man with a cleft palate came in to complain about an injustice."

[Daren · Rating 2 out of 5]

A meandering tale of the journey in the 1950's from England to Korea, and on to New Zealand and Australia, but also the many stops along the way - Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan (twice), Papua New Guinea and Ceylon (Sri Lanka).