Travels in Nihilon

by Alan Sillitoe

Near Fine. Dust Jacket Near Fine. 1st Edition/ This rare and vintage book is a perfect addition to any bibliophile's collection

Genres: Fiction

254 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1971

About the author

Alan Sillitoe was an English writer, one of the "Angry Young Men" of the 1950s (although he, in common with most of the other writers to whom the label was applied, had never welcomed it).
For more see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Sil...

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

More than a tad baffling, this book, which may have been the author's intention. And yet it's a very simple story. Five people set out from the fictional land of Cronacia to the neighbouring republic of Nihilon, charged with writing a guidebook to the only nihilistic state in the world. Setting out by five different routes - bike, ship, train, plane, and car - they arrange to meet in the capital. But instead they are all caught up in a violent political upheaval as the more conventional forces ousted by the nihilists 25 years earlier make a bid to regain control.

The book is hard to fit into the tradition of Utopian fiction, because Nihilon is not in any sense a Utopia. It is a society founded - or possibly unfounded - on greed, selfishness, dishonesty, and violence. The regime of the shadowy President Nil sets out to be antithesis of everything all governments - democratic or otherwise - claim to be. Everything is up for grabs, nothing is certain, nobody can be trusted - and that is as it should be, says the state. As Sillitoe observes, the result is a society in which the individual has to make significant moral decisions several times a day rather than once every fifteen years or so.

Some aspects of the novel are satirical, and a bit heavy-handed. It's illegal to drive without being drunk, for instance. Then there's an attitude to feminism which is just what you'd expect of a post-war British writer - some episodes involving rape leave a nasty aftertaste. But Sillitoe is a real writer, and much of the prose is excellent, offering economical and elegant descriptions of the various outrages and deceits practiced upon on his characters. In this respect it resembles Catch-22 somewhat, and the more bizarre bits of nihilist 'logic' foreshadow the work of Douglas Adams.

Perhaps the real purpose of the novel (and I'm guessing wildly, here) is to make us re-examine the hypocrisies of our own society and our own individual lives. But in the end Travels in Nihilon defies easy analysis and instead leaves the reader wondering what the journey accomplished, and where one might go next.

[Duncan · Rating 3 out of 5]

An odd book this, one that was recommended to me. Overall it reads like an old fashioned exploration novel, Erewhon or Gulliver's Travels, but the land under exploration is like none other I've read anywhere, a Nihilistic society where the rules change from moment to moment and something akin to organised chaos reigns. The book follows five explorers, each of whom travel to Nihilon by a different route and it has immediate appeal since the first encounter at the border I found very funny. However it gets quite confusing and I found it difficult to tell each of the 5 apart. Handy that the first travelled, by bicycle, was called Adam and the second, by car, Benjamin. I hoped the alphabetic theme would continue (the 5th is Edgar at least) as it was one of the few defining characteristics of each individual, especially once they started changing mode of transport. This is also a high stress read, since the land and people under examination are constantly shifting the goalposts and changing the rules, thus every encounter is unpredictable and challenging. I was grateful for the short chapter format. The book is clearly allegorical, but I didn't feel clever enough to follow the real life situation being alluded to, perhaps that aspect has dated. Some of the detail was brilliant, war is fought by older people who have less to lose, factories are run by owners who take salaries, whilst the shop floor workers share the profits, roads have a higher minimum speed in town and it's illegal to drive sober. But after a mention in passing, very few of these snippets affect the story in any real way and the overall story feels a bit pointless. Perhaps that's the point. Central to the story is a revolution that erupts, seemingly as a revolt against the rule of Nihilism, which seems an appropriately nihilistic thing to do, to be replaced by a ruling system at least as arbitrary as the last. Yes, ok, I see that really is the overall message.

[Billy Pilgrim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember reading this first time it came out, and for some reason decided I would like to revisit it 30 years later.
It concerns the planning of a guide book into as the largely uncharted Nihilist republic of Nihilon, and whilst it has some nice comic touches in the inverted logic of the Nihilists and a precursor of Douglas Adams Babelfish (the Tonguemaster) it doesn't seem to know where it wants to go.
The characters start of as would be guidebook writers, but change into Revolutionaries. There are sex scenes but they are strangely prude (odd for a Nihilist paradise)
At the end of the day, I am glad Google managed to reunite me with a past love, but as with all past loves , you find they haven't moved on, whilst you have.

[Rob Wiltsher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally finished it and ended up less than satisfied with the ending, it has to be said. Lack of sympathy with most of the characters didn't exactly help.

[Bobbie Darbyshire · Rating 2 out of 5]

Five travellers arrive to compile a new guidebook for Nihilon, a country governed by anarchic rules and the eccentric President Nil. When I read ‘Saturday night and Sunday morning’ and ‘The Loneliness of the long-distance runner’ for a book group last year, I was intrigued to see that the writer famous for these two had subsequently published 17 other books of fiction as well as poetry, plays, non-fiction and children’s fiction, for none of which he seemed to be at all famous. So, I sent off for two of his later novels. This one (published in 1971) is billed as “a vision of capitalism gone mad”, so I was expecting a satirical critique of mid-twentieth-century western society, but it seemed to major more in absurdist paradox, reminding me, for example, of Flann O’Brien’s 'The Third Policeman', or The Goon Show, but not as clever or funny as either. Five protagonists with five separate but very similar storylines didn't help. I’m sure it has nuggets of humour and wisdom and in my teens/early twenties, I might have loved it, but not now, and after 60 pages I stopped reading.

[Peter Coomber · Rating 3 out of 5]

As far as I am aware, this novel was Sillitoe's only venture into satire. Some interesting ideas, but I'm not sure whether it worked. A mildly amusing story.

[Saleh Razzouk]

Excellent dystopia.

[Jp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Travels
Travels in Ni
Ilon
A war
A war
A warrior
A warrior
A warrior