This book begins with quotes from Protestant theologian H. Richard Niebuhr and Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton. I suspect a lot of readers will not pause at those names, unaware that they’re Christian thinkers. The Niebuhr quote says “Pilgrims are poets who create by taking journeys.”
This is a graphic memoir. The term “graphic” refers to the pictures. This is nonfiction — Ben Hatke is telling a story from his life in sequential pictures — frames like comic books — together with words.
It begins with “Why the hell does someone decide to do this? … to travel away from my house — moving ever eastward toward the rising sun — until I circle back to where I started?”
“The idea sprang,” Hatke says, from the Chesterton quote, which he encountered 25 years ago in a college library: “There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place.” Hatke takes it as a real-life challenge.
He tells us, “My start date will be determined by whatever passage I find across the Atlantic.” At this point, the picture accompanying the words is of Hatke sitting under a tree drawing this book. “After that, because of the fluid nature of the connections, I’ll have no pre-arranged tickets. Mostly I’ll be finding my way as I go.”
Then we see a panel of someone off-page saying, “Fool,” and “Why do this?” Ben offers no answer, just as questers and seekers of every era have faced similar accusations.
There are months of planning. All of this is shown through drawing and text. One example is a two-pages spread that details everything to go in his pack and on his body. It is fabulously drawn, with dozens of items including a Patagonia jacket, swim trunks, keyboard, clippers, progressives as well as contact lenses, mini-deodorant, and talismans (“No matter how minimalist you go, always leave room for a few tiny treasures and charms from loved ones. Anchors for the heart.”).
Day one of the journey, he begins by walking and shows himself thinking “Socrates, Jesus, Buddha…ambulatory sages have shaped our world.” There are lots of previous travelers and pilgrims who fill the pages. Even Bill Bryson is shown appearing to Hatke as a ghost, talking about travel by foot and advising how best to tell a story.
There are other interesting figures. Before the midway point, Hatke encounters Ibn Battuta, the fourteenth-century Moroccan Muslim traveler and scholar, while in Istanbul. Battuta stands behind him on the road as Hatke reflects: “You’re one of history’s greatest travelers! You left Tangier in 1325 at, what, 21 years old? Intending a pilgrimage to Mecca, but you just kept going.”
Hatke is accompanied also by his daughter Ronia, who died a few years earlier in an accident. One panel shows a weight of rocks piled on his shoulders beside the words “grief is part of my luggage. Something I carry.”
There are a lot of other memories he carries. And there’s a full itinerary. Don’t let the personal, sometimes navel-gazing, details trip you up, or miss the point. This is a paean to a world where all people might connect around the values of life’s quest, and discovery.
Does he accomplish his goal? Spoiler: yes, 300 pages later. And there are other theological voices quoted, such as the German Catholic philosopher, Josef Pieper, near the end: “Joy, wonder, and curiosity are the guideposts of life.”
