Jason Burke
Beyond the Spectacle
Travels with Herodotus
By Ryszard Kapuscinski (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 288pp £20)

Long-term admirers of Ryszard Kapuscinski may be disappointed to learn that in Travels with Herodotus, his last work, the Polish journalist and writer is mellower, kinder, warmer than in books published in the spit and fury of his younger years. The opening lines - a description of the moment when, as a young student in a devastated post-war Poland, he first heard the name of the Greek historian - lack the rawness of those other works. The preface of Another Day of Life, Kapuscinski's minor masterpiece on the war in Angola in 1975, commences with the words: 'this is a book ... about being alone and lost'. The first chapter starts with the bald statement: 'For three months I lived in Luanda, in the Tivoli Hotel.' From his hotel room, Kapuscinski said, he could see the freighters out to sea sailing away when the news from the front was so dismal that there was no point in staying. He of course stayed. The author of Travels with Herodotus is a happier man than the driven reporter of earlier works. So nor is there the horrific immediacy of Kapuscinski's descriptions of demonstrations in Tehran in 1979 that mark another great work, The Shah of Shahs. In that, a typically economic description of the government security forces carefully picking off a wheelchair-bound protestor left to his fate in the middle of a street by the crowd has a harrowing power. The image has stayed with me and surfaced at odd times, particularly while reporting from Iraq in recent years.

Nor is there the sheer fear that permeates many of the other episodes that Kapuscinski relates. Indeed most of the stories that the author, who died in January, tells are self-deprecating or comic. They are far from being macho war-stories. The most bloody episodes are found in Herodotus himself where Greeks, Persians, Babylonians and others butcher each other with an astonishing enthusiasm, cruelty and nonchalance.

We do have, however, much that is classic Kapuscinski. Firstly, there are the brief, beautiful passages of description. The young 25-year-old Pole who sets out, with Herodotus and a pile of Socialist convictions in his baggage, on what was to be a lifetime of travelling is not just attracted by the stereotypically exotic. The two paragraphs that communicate the sudden, dazzling apparition of Rome glimpsed from a circling plane, the first fully illuminated city Kapuscinski had ever seen, are magnificent. In Khartoum, Kapuscinski sees Louis Armstrong play in a silent outdoor auditorium. With his typically acute and human eye, Kapuscinski notes that 'Armstrong during the concert was ... merry, cheerful, animated ... Armstrong immediately after was heavy, exhausted, weak, his face covered in wrinkles, extinguished.' And all those who have worked and written in Kabul - Kapuscinski was there in the Fifties - have struggled to communicate the stunning clarity of the air, of the sky above the city on its dusty plateau, and of the frigid nights. After sundown, Kapuscinski says, 'the streets look as if a spontaneous, improvised mystery play were being staged upon them. The all-pervasive darkness is pierced only by oil lamps and torches burning on the street stalls ... People pass silently - hunched, covered figures whipped on by the cold and the wind.'

There is also Kapuscinski's typical portrayal of his own profession. He uses Herodotus as the paradigm of the conscientious reporter. 'How does Herodotus work?' he asks: 'He wanders, looks, talks, listens, in order that he can later note down what he learned and saw or simply to remember better.' Yet this noble aim often gets swamped by the reality of logistics, newsdesks, deadlines. Trying to get out of a war-racked, flooded Congo, Kapuscinski explains, is not easy. For a start, he does not know where he is. Secondly, there is no transport available. He hopes, he says, to get to Uganda, from where, via London, he might be able to get a dispatch finally to his office in Warsaw. 'In this profession, the pleasure of travelling and the fascination with what one sees is inevitably subordinate to the imperative of maintaining one's ties with headquarters and of transmitting to them what is current and important. That is why we are sent out into the world - and there are no other self-justifications.' Nothing, as any honest correspondent will tell you, is more true.

Two other themes preoccupy Kapuscinski. The first is, unsurprisingly, the importance of words and of language. As a young man, trying to work with little success and less English in India, he had run headlong into 'the wall' of a language that he did not speak. The book is full of references to various languages, to identities based on languages, to differences based in language. The second is history. Kapuscinski quotes long - perhaps too long - chunks of Herodotus. Some are revealing. It is difficult not to read the Greek historian's account of how 'the tight, rigid, monolithic' Persian armies - the superpower of the day - were outfought and outfaced by the 'loose, mobile, ever-shifting configurations of small tactical cells' favoured by the Scythians without thinking of an obvious contemporary parallel. Elsewhere Kapuscinski talks of the 'chronological provincialism' of those who are as limited in their historical perspective as others might be geographically.

Recently there has been a fashion of picking factual holes in Kapuscinski's various accounts. There are indeed mistakes (sometimes glaring), as you would expect from a reporter working on the ground without the benefit of decades of academic learning about a subject. There is always a tension between journalists working in the field and academic experts, many of whom rarely visit the more far-flung corners of their supposed areas of study and often do not themselves speak local languages. The latter, possibly justifiably, begrudge the fact that it is the reporters who essentially represent a given place, nation, problem or question to a mass audience. But journalists are not academics; they work faster and under rougher conditions than most university researchers. Even those of the relative rigour of Kapuscinski are far from infallible. Picking holes in his narrative because he is mistaken on the exact practices of certain Nile tribes seems more than a little churlish.

One criticism that is just is of Kapuscinski's jarring tendency to err into the worst sort of Eurocentric generalisation. In The Shadow of the Sun he wrote that 'the European and the African ... have an entirely different concept of time'. In Travels with Herodotus, he talks about 'the Chinese' and 'the Indian', the former naturally inscrutable and the latter excitable or child-like. This is a shame. Yet the simple fact remains that Kapuscinski was more than a reporter and more than a writer. His spare, stripped prose is a thing of beauty; like the Herodotus he so affectionately describes, he was rigorous, curious and, as he says explicitly in this book, always sought to go beyond the spectacle and the spectacular to try and understand the truth about what was happening in his world. His last book is a fitting testament.