Lost Oasis by Robert Twigger

Opinion

Robert Twigger's latest travel odyssey is a search for a fabled oasis in the Egyptian Sahara.

As in Voyageur, which mirrored the 18th century Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie on his journey across North America, Twigger is following in famous footsteps: the search for "Zerzura", he tells us, "drove the exploration of the eastern Sahara".

Harding King, Ralph Bagnold and Count Almasy (of The English Patient fame) all pursued it, though none found it. Twigger realises it probably doesn't exist, but Zerzura is just a pretext. His real fascination is with the desert itself. He and his family have abandoned suburban Oxfordshire for Cairo; now, he simply seeks "vastness in the face of human confusion and brain fatigue".

Unusually for a travel book, not a huge amount happens in Lost Oasis.

Twigger goes on a few expeditions into the Sahara. He builds a special trolley for his baggage. He has trouble getting hold of maps and becomes enmeshed in the Egyptian bribery system.

He meets a host of colourful characters, including megalomaniac tour guides and Dutch explorer Arita Baaijens.

Twigger is fairly good on the romance of the desert - on its stillness and serenity.

"The jungle is more," he writes. "I wanted less." The desert destroys perspective ("there is nothing in the background"), but it preserves almost everything else. Rust advances slowly; hungry organisms are scarce. Under the sand, paper, wood and rubber are preserved as if new.

In The English Patient, a biplane is dug up after 10 years and flown away.

This is by no means impossible, Twigger tells us. In 1992, a truck, lost for 50 years, was discovered. It was refuelled, its tyres inflated and then driven to a museum.

Twigger finds old weapon-heads, silica glass and an ancient quern for grinding corn. He gleefully indulges in the "delinquent activity" of archaeology - otherwise known as looting.

He is full of diverting desert trivia - why Bedouins wear wool (insulation against hot winds); when best not to get stung by a scorpion (early evening) - but his narrative reads too much like a series of loosely connected events.

Twigger has won various literary awards, but he retains an anxiety about his status as a writer.

With a few tweaks, Lost Oasis could have been a novel with particular interest in the flaws and idiosyncrasies of its first-person narrator. As a travelogue, however, it doesn't quite stand up. Like Twigger's subject, it is full of little gems, but it also seems somewhat arid.

- Observer

* Published by Orion