His mind crowded with vivid images of Africa, Graham Greene set off in 1935 to discover Liberia, a remote and unfamiliar republic founded for released slaves. Now with a new introduction by Paul Theroux, Journey Without Maps is the spellbinding record of Greene’s journey. Crossing the red-clay terrain from Sierra Leone to the coast of Grand Bassa with a chain of porters, he came to know one of the few areas of Africa untouched by colonization. Western civilization had not yet impinged on either the human psyche or the social structure, and neither poverty, disease, nor hunger seemed able to quell the native spirit.
The narrator of this travel book shows himself to be fascinated by what is abominable: disease, war crimes, cruelty and nightmares are the main examples in the text. He opens a critical dialogue on this subject with his two main hypotexts, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and, especially, The Blue Book, a British government publication; the abomination is found to be polysemic. His journey transforms the supposedly primitive Liberian hinterland into a writerly text. At the same time, the narrator uses the part of the country he is exploring as a metaphor for the unconscious; hence he compares his voyage to Freud’s ‘journey’.
