For some bizarre reason such books are often the opposite of what you’d expect for  a visual and exciting subject with very wide appeal. Example: the absolutely dreadful Canon Eos Digital Photography Photo Workshop by Serge Timacheff which does the nearly impossible – it combines poor picture selection, with poor picture quality, bad layout and impenetrable captions. Think that’s unusual? Don’t bother to buy this next one, just trust me: the Collins Complete Photography Course is as clunky as clunky gets and is so badly laid out that it is actually unreadable. A quick perusal of the photography section of any major book store will produce dozens more like these.

Why? There are two good reasons. First,  publishers make the dire mistake of having these books created by photographers rather than good book editors, on the dubious principle that techies must know how to create a book on their specialist subject. Usually, they don’t.  Second, photo selection is a skilled and highly creative business in  which art comes way before educational purpose. If,  like the Collins authors John Garrett and Graeme Harris, you work on the principle that images used must only illustrate the point being made (which sounds logical) you will end up with the equivalent of a restaurant which offers  unpalatable  ingredients rather than seductive dishes.

The Insight Guides are rightly famed for the brilliance of their imagery and the sharp layout of text and graphics all of which, in a great book, need to be offered in an integrated whole. It’s no accident that this new and impressive book is edited by someone who has  two decades of experience producing great travel books.  It’s evident from every page of this book that he has  exactly the corpus of editorial experience and archive materials needed to avoid techie-dom, to side-step clunkiness and do what should be done with such a rich subject: produce a celebration of imagery, colour, visual excitement and… yes… wait for it.. it’s coming… instruction that you want to act on. Result: exactly what is needed by a market full of people like me, who wander the globe with their cameras wondering why their images are  mediocre ; or,   as frustrating, occasionally taking really good ones only to  find they are  unable to maintain that standard with any consistency.

The solution, more or less guaranteed;  pay a modest £14.99  and take Tony Halliday and his team on holiday with you.  He’ll chat to you about the boring stuff – light, composition and the camera; he’ll explain the Rule of Thirds and Golden Section in a visual way you’ll instantly understand; and he’ll take the classic subjects – mountains, seascapes, city lights, peoples and safari and the rest, and shake life back into them for you. The image to the left, of Mt Valier in the French Pyrenees by the editor himself, is the kind of thing he believes that more of us could take if we followed the principles and techniques outlined in his book.

One reason I think this book moves the genre way beyond the simply  instructional  is that it also combines some fascinating photographic travel history (and the appropriate images) with a truly classic archive of great shots by the known and less well known. It’s really good to know in whose footsteps we tread as we raise our cameras to take another image. It might just help make our own better and more memorable.

In ten years time you’ll be looking through this book and planning the next journey and the pictures thereof with pleasure. Your Canon and Collins books will linger only as a bad dream in which you threw them out of a train window in Peru to return them to the environment from which the paper wasted in making them  should never have been wrested in the first place…

Link: www.insightguides.com

Cover price is £14.99; but it’s £8.89 on Amazon (or was when I checked).

‘There is a man here, miss, asking for your uncle,’ said Rose. And stood breathing. ‘What man?’ asked the young woman, who was engaged upon some embroidery of a difficult nature, at which she was now forced to look more closely, holding the little frame to the light. ‘Or is it perhaps a gentleman?’ .  ‘I do not know,’ said the servant. ‘It is a kind of foreign man.’….. Something had made this woman monotonous. Her big breasts moved dully as she spoke, or she would stand, and the weight of her silences impressed itself on strangers. If the more sensitive amongst those she served or addressed failed to look at Rose, it was because her manner seemed to accuse the conscience, or it could have been, more simply, that they were embarrassed by her harelip.
‘A foreigner?’ said her mistress, and her Sunday dress sighed. ‘It can only be the German.’

It was this last of several narrative hooks, the German, that pulled me into the story and kept me there. For I had been to school in Germany, a fact curiously ignored by my grammar school, leaving me feeling as alien in my own country as ‘the German’, the Voss of the title, felt in Australia.
I read all of White’s novels in the years afterwards including The Vivisector when it was published in 1970, a first Christmas present from my first wife. It was a shock. A story of an artist, Hurtle Duffield, dedicated to the Australian artist Sidney Nolan on whose life it is based. A bitter portrait of an unloving man whose engagement with women and men is about ruthlessly dissecting them as subjects of his work. The language is wonderful, the characters riveting but the work itself bleak and without pleasure. It left me disturbed and I read no more of his work, moving on to new and more cheerful authors.

Years later, by then an author myself, I came across White’s autobiography Flaws in the Glass. The moment I began reading his bitter and cynical self portrait I recognized Hurtle Duffield – and, it must be said, that same tendency many young novelists (including myself then, I fear!) who  cut their creative teeth with a detached, slightly smug and unengaged view of things. My rejection of White was complete.
Then, last year, I saw the original hard back of Voss in an Oxford bookshop and bought it at once. Again, its brilliance and empathy captured me.
Now I find that The Vivisector is the potential ‘lost’ Man Booker Prize winner. Which puts me in a quandary because I rate the author very highly but this particular book still leaves me (I have just re-read it) feeling low. Unlike, say, J G Farrell’s wonderfully funny and warm Troubles (also short-listed for this prize) which for now gets my first vote. But time to read all the contenders I think… with reviews to follow.

LINKS: The full list is: Patrick White The Vivisector (Vintage); Nina Bawden The Birds in the Trees (Virago); Shirley Hazzard The Bay of Noon (Virago); Mary Renault Fire from Heaven (Arrow); & Muriel Spark The Driver’s Seat (Penguin); J G Farrell Troubles (Phoenix). Full details of the Lost Man Booker Prize and how you can vote here:  http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/stories/1412 There is a good Wikipedia entry on Patrick White at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_White and the Nobel Prizes website has an excellent critique of all his books, including The Vivisector, at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/articles/hansson/index.html

So now I’m reading her latest collection Leaving Fingerprints (Bloodaxe Books, 2009) and find my late-night impressions were right. Her theme here  combines  impermanence and the preciousness of the moment with a strong sense of the presence in that moment of ancestral shadows. As a  restless wanderer through the external landscapes of town and country and the internal territories of the mind, body and emotions,  it’s a theme that appeals to me.

The room with two doors

Pass the wine, we’ll leave here soon enough.
We were visitors, we always knew,
even though the host welcomed us,
ushered us in, lit candles for us,
plied us with carafes of wine.

It would be a mistake, however,
to imagine we are free to stay
in this room with two doors,
drinking and eating, telling jokes,
exchanging stories for ever.

The wind swept us in through one door
and is pushing at the other.
Outside, it is waiting for us, running
impatient fingers through the trees,

waiting to take our hearts, browse through them
and toss them to the earth like finished leaves.

The blurb with Leaving Fingerprints has a first sentence which opens up so many lines of enquiry that it might be the start of prize-winning literary novel: Imtiaz Dharker was born in Lahore, Pakistan, grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow and eloped with a Hindu Indian to live in Bombay…. setting up perfectly the following wonderful poem of memory, reconciliation, forgiveness and familial love:

Green spiked hair

So I ran away from home with a man
from another country and a small suitcase
that contained a pair of pink suede shoes,
a passport, the condensed sayings of
Chairman Mao wrapped in red underwear
and a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire.

At Heathrow tens years after I had left
I met my father coming off a flight.
Hello? I said. He said Hello, polite as ever,
and walked on. I followed. Excuse me?
I’m your daughter? Ah, he said, not breaking step.
So are you well? And your family?
I’m afraid I need to go now
to catch a connecting flight.

A few years later at another airport
I catch up with him at last.
He had no memory of the incident
when an unknown woman with green spiked
hair accosted him in the transit lounge
claiming to be his little girl

the one he lost
the one who left with a suitcase and
his only copy of the poems of Faiz.

But in the arrival hall the lines come back to him,
Give some tree the gift of green again,
he says, smiling at the words or me,
Let one bird sing.

The green spikes in the hair of his daughter, Imtiaz, may be long gone, but she sings, how she sings.

There’s more about her work and how to obtain it at http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852248491 Make sure to watch the short video that runs at the foot of  this link. It’s a brief understated masterclass in how to present poetry.