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A Land of Two Halves Joe Bennett 9780743263573 Books

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A Land of Two Halves Joe Bennett 9780743263573 Books

"If I've got nothing to read I feel like an amputee. In earlier hitchhiking years I often found myself in foreign lavatories with nothing printed but my passport. I can still recite, more or less, that lovely piece about Her Britannic Majesty's Principal Secretary of State requesting and requiring, in the name of Her Majesty, every wop kraut dago mick and spick not only to let me pass freely without let or hindrance but also to bandage any wounds I may incur and lend me a fiver to get home. Or else." - Joe Bennett in A LAND OF TWO HALVES

Joe Bennett, born and raised south of London, England, took up permanent residence in New Zealand in 1989 at age 29. Sixteen years later, he wrote LAND OF TWO HALVES, a travel narrative that describes his hitchhiking circuit of the North and South Islands of his adopted country.

Besides enjoying Bennett for the travel essayist he is, my interest in this particular book was catalyzed by the magnificent New Zealand mountain topography as seen in such recent films as the The Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy (Platinum Series Special Extended Edition) - topography that is located on the South Island.

What I enjoy most about Joe is his curmudgeon-in-training worldview, his ability to delight me with descriptive imagery, and his self-deprecating humor. The first is illustrated by his observation of those he finds in Queenstown, South Island:

"... it's full of the young, wearing the sort of trousers that have zips at the knee and that can be turned into shorts by a flick of a Velcro tab, or into a rucksack, or a four-wheel drive amphibious vehicle with drinks cabinet and emergency whistle. A disproportionate number of the young people are British. I constantly eavesdrop on boastful discussions about parapenting and hangovers, conducted in accents that I can place to the nearest soap opera."

(Not being familiar with the term "parapenting", I had to look it up; it's paragliding by another name.)

The author's imagery and self-deprecating humor are represented by his experiences with motels - and one in particular on the North Island:

"I didn't stay in a motel till I was twenty-five when I hitched down the west coast of the States. Motels were the cheapest places to stay and the cheapest of them were seriously dire. They resembled temporary porn studios - and some of them probably were, though rarely while I was in them. But they established my mental template for a motel room, a sort of Platonic ideal of grunge. It's this room (in Rotorua). Dark, humming with the noise of close traffic, a narrow sink, a leaking tap, don't-care joinery thick with paint, a tissue-thin pillowcase with the ghosts of stains washed into the once pink cloth, a ceiling of stippled plaster, each stipple minutely tipped with dirt like a smoker's tooth, a dented kettle that won't switch itself off, and beneath it a laminated wooden tea-tray, bleached and buckled and chipped by time and chance and a thousand transient forgotten guests. Every one of those guests has left a molecule of self. The air's like gravy ... The room is so authentically dispiriting that I like it. I head out to pootle in a good mood."

("Pootle" means to walk about exploring.)

Mind you, Bennett's narrative does justice to (at least) the physical beauty of New Zealand, particularly the South Island. However, I'm not sure that the local tourist boards or chambers of commerce would always find his observations concerning the related amenities and activities helpful, especially as he readily admits to loathing the usual touristy stuff. And hitching isn't the way most would choose to do an itinerary. I certainly wouldn't.

More recently since the release of A LAND OF TWO HALVES, Joe wrote and had published Mustn't Grumble: In Search of England and the English, an account of his return to and exploration of England to discover if it was as he remembered it after an absence of two decades. It was, and yet wasn't; grumble he did. I could relate particularly well to this book as I've visited the United Kingdom -my favorite destination on the planet - multiple times from 1975 to 2010, and Bennett's observations on things changed and unchanged seemed right on. I enjoyed MUSTN'T GRUMBLE immensely.

An avid traveler myself, and one not afraid to go it solo, one passage in A LAND OF TWO HALVES was particularly resonant:

"The man-with-a-book is a restrained sort, cautious, sensible, polite, wary of danger, little more than warm and breathing furniture, barely affecting the place he occupies. By ten o'clock he's back in his motel bed, well-fed, content, and still reading. His adventures are the adventures of others, the word-made pictures in his head."

Bennett has now joined Bill Bryson as the two travel essayists whose writings I'll endeavor to indiscriminately acquire and read, come what may. Such an author, for a bibliophile of whatever reading tastes, is a pearl beyond value in a lifetime of reading.


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A Land of Two Halves Joe Bennett 9780743263573 Books Reviews

A fun and highly detailed journey about Joe's New Zealand adventure. I could very much relate to his opinions on people and tourist sites, which was humorous for me. There seemed to be a bit too much effort with the vocabulary at times, but that didn't slow the read down too much. Overall, not the best travel adventure book I have ever read yet still recommend. Ignore the 1-star review by another reviewer. Notice he only has one review (that one) and is simply a hater.
This book certainly looks good... the idea of hitch-hiking as a way of exploring a country and its society is clever - you meet a lot of different people and get to see parts that are not always up there on the "must see" list of tourist destinations - and, on top of that, Joe Bennett is a skilled and entertaining writer. But despite such promising credentials, it really doesn't work in the way it should.

The problems start with the sequencing of his journey, which is very strange. The first half of the book finds him shooting off from his home in Christchurch to the increasingly bleak far south of the South Island, before heading up the island's equally remote West Coast. Hitch-hiking through these areas, which are notorious for their sparse habitation and bad weather, is a pretty daunting task and, not surprisingly, he gets fed-up with it two thirds of the way round and heads back home. Problem is that, by doing so, he misses out the whole of the north of the South Island which is not only stunningly pretty (with often glorious weather) but which is also one of the most interesting areas of the country. His journey round the North Island is at least more logical, taking in most of the "important" areas. But by now he's clearly getting very bored with hitching (so much so that he rents a car for large sections), a problem that's then compounded by his hitting some pretty appalling late Autumn weather, begging the obvious question of why choose to hitch at this time of year?

Next up, the people he chooses to meet are pretty strange. Not everyone picks up hitch-hikers and those who do are, as he finds, often slightly odd and usually want to talk a lot about their slightly odd lives. Off the road, he clearly likes a beer or two and, as a result, spends huge amounts of the journey chatting to bar-proppers in small pubs and hotels. Nothing wrong with either activity, but as an insight into New Zealand society it's a limited and far from representative cross-section of people.

Finally, Joe's either a pretty morose kind of guy or the boredom & banality of standing by endless roads for hours on end waiting for a lift, followed by a booze-up with some fairly lonely people in a small town pub gets to him. Whatever the reason, he spends increasing parts of the book reflecting on the less attractive aspects of New Zealand life while describing uninteresting parts of the country in bad weather. Not unexpectedly, by the end of it, his & your bottle are most definitely in "half empty" mode.

Which is all very unfair. I've visited New Zealand many times and lived in Christchurch. Sure, it's small country that's a long way from anywhere and its people are continually grappling with an inferiority complex that comes from being small and remote. But it's also stunningly beautiful with, at the right times of the year, quite excellent weather and a population that must rank amongst the most friendly and interesting anywhere. It's a superb holiday destination and, for the right type of person, a quite wonderful place to live. All aspects of New Zealand that our increasingly road-weary and often downright gloomy guide fails to capture and which, as a result, leads to a very unbalanced insight into both the country and its people.

Bad news then? Well not quite, because he can write and his stories are not only enjoyable and often quite funny, but his wet & windy journey becomes, in itself, an entertaining exercise in personal endurance. And, on the way, he experiences a side of New Zealand that most miss which, in turn, stimulates him to ruminate on a number of interesting and important social issues facing the country. Just don't get fooled into believing that it's really like this because, unless you too are mad enough to decide to hitch around the place at the wrong time of the year, it's most certainly not.
Joe's books are uniformly great, and this one is no exception. I've never been to NZ (I don't count the hour I spent in the airport at Auckland) but traveling with Joe is the next best thing....
The author's perspective is,at least to me, that he has spent too much time in New Zealand and doesn't really enjoy living there. If it wasn't for his dogs then he would have no real reason to stay. He hitchhikes around alot of New Zealand in search of a reason to stay. He spends alot of his book discussing hitchhiking techniques or potential rides. What he discribes of the scenry or way of life is always in a somewhat bored,sarcastic tone. I'm sure that there are Kiwis that think in those terms, but in all my trips thru out NZ, I never met any locals that were like that. They usually are quite upbeat about where they are.But to put things straight, he is an English transplant and has lived there 15 years. But what I really liked about his book is his descriptions of the details of life in NZ. Just lots of little insights into rugby, youth and travel, bits of history,local politics. Just little stuff that would be missed in larger scope books.
"If I've got nothing to read I feel like an amputee. In earlier hitchhiking years I often found myself in foreign lavatories with nothing printed but my passport. I can still recite, more or less, that lovely piece about Her Britannic Majesty's Principal Secretary of State requesting and requiring, in the name of Her Majesty, every wop kraut dago mick and spick not only to let me pass freely without let or hindrance but also to bandage any wounds I may incur and lend me a fiver to get home. Or else." - Joe Bennett in A LAND OF TWO HALVES

Joe Bennett, born and raised south of London, England, took up permanent residence in New Zealand in 1989 at age 29. Sixteen years later, he wrote LAND OF TWO HALVES, a travel narrative that describes his hitchhiking circuit of the North and South Islands of his adopted country.

Besides enjoying Bennett for the travel essayist he is, my interest in this particular book was catalyzed by the magnificent New Zealand mountain topography as seen in such recent films as the The Lord of the Rings The Motion Picture Trilogy (Platinum Series Special Extended Edition) - topography that is located on the South Island.

What I enjoy most about Joe is his curmudgeon-in-training worldview, his ability to delight me with descriptive imagery, and his self-deprecating humor. The first is illustrated by his observation of those he finds in Queenstown, South Island

"... it's full of the young, wearing the sort of trousers that have zips at the knee and that can be turned into shorts by a flick of a Velcro tab, or into a rucksack, or a four-wheel drive amphibious vehicle with drinks cabinet and emergency whistle. A disproportionate number of the young people are British. I constantly eavesdrop on boastful discussions about parapenting and hangovers, conducted in accents that I can place to the nearest soap opera."

(Not being familiar with the term "parapenting", I had to look it up; it's paragliding by another name.)

The author's imagery and self-deprecating humor are represented by his experiences with motels - and one in particular on the North Island

"I didn't stay in a motel till I was twenty-five when I hitched down the west coast of the States. Motels were the cheapest places to stay and the cheapest of them were seriously dire. They resembled temporary porn studios - and some of them probably were, though rarely while I was in them. But they established my mental template for a motel room, a sort of Platonic ideal of grunge. It's this room (in Rotorua). Dark, humming with the noise of close traffic, a narrow sink, a leaking tap, don't-care joinery thick with paint, a tissue-thin pillowcase with the ghosts of stains washed into the once pink cloth, a ceiling of stippled plaster, each stipple minutely tipped with dirt like a smoker's tooth, a dented kettle that won't switch itself off, and beneath it a laminated wooden tea-tray, bleached and buckled and chipped by time and chance and a thousand transient forgotten guests. Every one of those guests has left a molecule of self. The air's like gravy ... The room is so authentically dispiriting that I like it. I head out to pootle in a good mood."

("Pootle" means to walk about exploring.)

Mind you, Bennett's narrative does justice to (at least) the physical beauty of New Zealand, particularly the South Island. However, I'm not sure that the local tourist boards or chambers of commerce would always find his observations concerning the related amenities and activities helpful, especially as he readily admits to loathing the usual touristy stuff. And hitching isn't the way most would choose to do an itinerary. I certainly wouldn't.

More recently since the release of A LAND OF TWO HALVES, Joe wrote and had published Mustn't Grumble In Search of England and the English, an account of his return to and exploration of England to discover if it was as he remembered it after an absence of two decades. It was, and yet wasn't; grumble he did. I could relate particularly well to this book as I've visited the United Kingdom -my favorite destination on the planet - multiple times from 1975 to 2010, and Bennett's observations on things changed and unchanged seemed right on. I enjoyed MUSTN'T GRUMBLE immensely.

An avid traveler myself, and one not afraid to go it solo, one passage in A LAND OF TWO HALVES was particularly resonant

"The man-with-a-book is a restrained sort, cautious, sensible, polite, wary of danger, little more than warm and breathing furniture, barely affecting the place he occupies. By ten o'clock he's back in his motel bed, well-fed, content, and still reading. His adventures are the adventures of others, the word-made pictures in his head."

Bennett has now joined Bill Bryson as the two travel essayists whose writings I'll endeavor to indiscriminately acquire and read, come what may. Such an author, for a bibliophile of whatever reading tastes, is a pearl beyond value in a lifetime of reading.