Book Report: The Songlines

22. Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (1987) (11/7/25)

I read this book decades ago, and was left feeling puzzled. Just what was the story? Sure, sure, it's nonfiction. And sure, sure, Chatwin himself is an ever-present character in the narrative, the "I" telling the story (whatever it is). He also is exploring, let's just say, wanderlust—which he calls nomadism. Something he seemed to suffer from.

I picked this book up again after a recent visit to Western Australia. And I remain just as bemused as that last time. 

It begins as a basic travelogue, in which Chatwin meets "Arkady" (he poses the book as fiction), who works with people—Indigenous and settler alike—to make sure that any development projects (like new railway lines) are copacetic in the vast reaches of Northern Territory. 

Chatwin travels with Arkady, meets people, hears their stories. Then midway through the book he turns to his notebooks and, in snippets of jottings, wonders about nomadism, about earliest mankind, about evolution, about how we make sense of our humanity. All of which is fascinating.

It's like an amalgam of travelogue and essay.

But it's also frustrating, because there's no through-line. Where the heck is he going? We never really know. It's a pastiche of experiences and words of wisdom.

Here's a passage I appreciated:

She had never had a training in linguistics. Yet her work on the dictionary had given her an interest in the myth of Babel. Why, when Aboriginal life had been so uniform, had there been 200 languages in Australia? Could you really explain this in terms of tribalism or isolation? Surely not! She was beginning to wonder whether language itself might not relate to the distribution of the human species over the land.
     "Sometimes," she said, ""I'll ask Old Alex to name a plant and he'll answer, 'No name,' meaning, 'The plant doesn't grow in this country.'"
     She'd then look for an informant who had, as a child, lived where the plant grew—and find that it had a name after all.  
     The "dry heart" of Australia, she said, was a jigsaw of microclimates, of different minerals in the soil and different plants and animals. A man raised in one part of the desert would know its flora and fauna backwards. He knew which plant attracted game. He knew his water. He knew where there were tubers underground. In other words, by naming all the "things" in his territory, he could always count on survival.
     "But if you took him blindfold to another country," she said, "he might end up lost and starving."
     "Because he'd lost his bearings?"
     "Yes."
     "You're saying the man 'makes' his territory by naming the 'things' in it?"
     "Yes, I am!" Her face lit up.
     "So the basis for a universal language can never have existed?"
     "Yes. Yes."
     Wendy said that, even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the "things" of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth.
     The child, at its mother's breast, will toy with the "thing," talk to it test its teeth on it, learn its name, repeat its name—and finally chuck it aside.
     "We give our children guns and computer games," Wendy said. "They give their children the land."

I gather, from reading a little about Chatwin, that he was an arrogant son-of-a-bitch. But he was thoughtful. And I appreciate that. I'm glad I reread this book. Though I also wish there had been a point to it.