5/10
Genuinely bad for the most parts, yet a few highlights manage to save the complete picture.
It's Evelyn Waugh entirely devout of any character. He's not mean, he's not funny, he's just honest and journalistic. It doesn't start like that. Introduction is fabulous, he gets the reader hyped with one of his trademark long narratives that ends on a high point. He's entering Guiana on a venture he never explains. Soon, though, poetic narrative dissolves into day to day drag through the jungle as he enters the interior and goes on a pointless, and never explained journey. Looking back at it, it's almost akin to Heart of Darkness, if it wasn't all so completely impersonal. His journey is mad to a degree, he often jogs well ahead of his party with no sense of danger. Goes on a weird detours, drinks tepid water, bathes in random creeks. At one time, he travels to Brazilian Boa Vista, with a plan of going through it to Menaus and then down the Amazon towards the coast, then he changes his mind, and with a single servant travels back to Guiana in a chaotic manner. He stops at various stages for extended periods. Sometime waiting for transport, other times recuperating, the other times just wasting time. The way he writes about it is the problem, it's some of the worst prose I've ever read from him. He's calm, never afraid, never self-critical, never funny, never joyous. His prose is deadbeat serious all the time, even though there are hints of joy and suffering in it, particularly when he returns to British catholic mission, and when his foot goes lame. Still, all of that is given in a straight, impersonal, journalistic jargon. Fortunately there a few rare gems in the text. His savannah description is superb, and he really livens up towards the end of his journey, or possible, he livens up because he realises that he's at the end of writing about it. Either way, out of nothing, we suddenly witness how great he can be. He goes on a lengthy discourse on airplane travel, he gives us Alfredo Sacramento story, and he argues Jungle reclamation, and he witnesses some waterfalls along the way. The way he talks about them, they're probably famous or something, but I wouldn't know anything about that. Another special occurrence is one particularly dirty joke, it comes so out of the blue, and is so effective, that it had me laughing out loud.
At the end of his journey he mentions that "whatever interior changes there were are the writer's own property and not marketable commodity." It's a shame, really, with a bit of introspection, this could be a decent travelogue. As it is, I can only recommend it to those interested in learning the background of A Handful of Dust. There's plenty of that here, a nucleus of characters and locations, Dickens, it's even possible he saved his own thoughts of his journey for it as well.