I recently booked tickets for a trip to Cambodia and Vietnam and as a chronic over-researcher, have been reading every guidebook, blog and travel advisory I can lay my hands on. The other perhaps less practical but certainly more evocative source I turn to before travelling, is fiction.
Ever since someone gave me a copy of Charles Dickens’s ATale of Two Cities before I went to Paris, I have loved finding books about places I’m going, or by authors from that place. Dickens has a knack for details and his depiction of Paris during the revolution is wonderfully absorbing. Now, I’m not a crazy person who thought that that would be the Paris I would find stepping off the plane, or even if I stepped out of a time machine, but it’s still a pretty good version of it and an enjoyable one to inhabit before visiting the real city where reminders of the revolution are everywhere.
In preparation for Vietnam, particularly Ho Chi Minh City, Iread Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, The Quiet American, a haunting picture of the decline of French colonialism and the would-be rise of the American influence there. Greene spent considerable time in Vietnam between 1951 and 1955 and the book’s knowing depiction of the tenuous French grip on the country reflects this. The fame of the book is such that several guides to Ho Chi Minh City point out that the Hotel Continental is real and still exists, though now a slightly decrepit colonial remnant by the looks of it (though I intend to do a bit of fan-girl investigation).
I’m now on the lookout for some good novels set in Cambodia or by Cambodian writers for ‘research’. I’m not sure that I’ll reread Heart of Darkness (as it's set in Africa) even though there is a bar of the same name in Phnom Penh for some reason (though again, I intend to investigate whether it is presided over by a scary bouncer called Kurtz). I’ll leave you with a few of my favourite books that let you hang out in other places for a bit:
-A Room with A View, E.M. Forster (Florence).
-The Inspector Maigret novels, Georges Simenon (Paris).
-Great Expectations, Charles Dickens (London).