The world is shrinking, what with the interwebs and tweeters and whatnots and hoohaws. Who will be the writing explorers now? The successors to Chatwin, Lewis and Thesiger? This is the question the Guardian tries to answer.
From the piece...
Returning to travel writing after such a long gap made me think again about the form. Has the genre anything left to offer in the age of mass tourism and the internet? And is there anyone of real talent still at work in travel writing? I believe the answer to both question is yes. Since 9/11 there has been a new insularity about English letters. The British once prided themselves on their cosmopolitan, island-nation global experience, yet throughout the Bush years our literature and media, as much as the Blair government, swallowed the Neocon lies and over-simplicifications about the Islamic world hook, line and sinker. As article piled on article, one longed to bring back the dead masters: where was Wilfred Thesiger or Bruce Chatwin when you really needed them?
Nevertheless, over the last few years there has been a slow trickle of books by younger writers which have, I think, been as good as anything published in the 1980s. Suketu Mehta's Bombay book Maximum City is one of the greatest city books ever written, in my opinion, while Alice Albinia's wonderful Empires of the Indus is a breathtaking debut by an author who writes enviably cadent and beautiful prose, but has nerves of steel and the pluck of a 21st century Freya Stark. I hugely admired Pankaj Mishra's collection of travel pieces Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond, am currently reading Christopher de Bellaigue's extraordinary book on Eastern Turkey: among Turkey's Forgotten Peoples. There are probably many others.
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