Wondering I's

Andrew Leci takes a journey into his own, haphazard literary world to examine the history of travel and its meaning. (No airlines were harmed in the writing of this piece.)

- Andrew Leci

IT HAS TAKEN me almost a quarter of a century to forgive my college tutor for his misguided advice. Well, I thought it was misguided. I suspect he was just being mischievous and paying me back for two years of perceived indolence. For one of my finals, my class had to embark on what was known as a seven-day paper, which is fairly self-explanatory.

At high noon on a Monday, we were given the exam questions and had seven days to produce a relevant treatise. The slightly odd thing about this particular assignment was that you were allowed to do your research beforehand, and the tutors, presumably, knew roughly what was going to crop up on the paper, meaning that students were unlikely to be completely side-swiped, and tutors were equally unlikely to give their charges a ‘bum steer’.

My tutor, however, after undue consultation, suggested that I might be interested in the picaresque novel – a narrative form that focused on a roguish, often lower-class individual who gets into adventures ‘on the road’, almost invariably written in the first person. Not so much wanderlust, perhaps, as living a slightly dodgy life away from home and having to constantly be on the move to stay out of trouble.

I quite liked the idea at first. And then I went to the library to pick up my reading material and instantly regretted not bringing a forklift. Each book was massive, a veritable tome. The shortest was, possibly, Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (a mere 380 pages) while Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy came in at more than 600 leafy bits. I was not happy.