I’d like to welcome fellow Vivien Leigh fan, Selina Chan, to the Vivien-Leigh.com Blog! Ms. Chan lives in New Zealand and works at a library. We had the pleasure of meeting in 2009 and she’s truly a knowledgeable fan! Obviously she has access to a TON of literature so it’s no surprise that her guest blog post is about a book. Today she’s reviewing Duncan Fallowell’s book Going as Far as I Can. If you’re interested in reading this book, it’s available for purchase in the Vivien-Leigh.com E-Store. Here’s the product description:
When Duncan Fallowell was left some money by a friend, he decided to put into practice a long held idea – to travel as far as possible from home so that he need never travel again and could relax. For him, this meant travelling to New Zealand, where another fantasy soon asserted itself – ‘to find the place of perfect exile’. Fallowell’s curiosity leads him onto the strangest paths and he found himself in pursuit of unknown painters and lost buildings and sex underground, of Karl Popper and a creature with the third eye and rose wine, of Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier who’d toured the country in the year of Fallowell’s birth, of suicidal writers and nuns and elusive answers to impossible questions. The faraway paradise gradually turns into a glittering stranger on the Pacific rim, filled with the uncertainties of our times – but also a wonderful place to breathe. The result is a moving encounter with the past, an anxious gaze into the future, but most of all a vivid voyage through the contemporary world, by turns profound, comical and erotic.
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I really didn’t think anybody could be genuinely obsessed with the Oliviers to come all the way to New Zealand to follow in their footsteps of a long ago tour but actually someone has written a book about this. Just one of those randoms I find off the shelf – its always
interesting to see what travel writers think of your own country.
Englishman Duncan Fallowell was left some money in a will and decided to blow it on a trip to New Zealand to get travel out of his system. Well alrighty then…who am I to judge of the mad things people do when they have loads of money to spend?
The only thing he knew about NZ was the Oliviers came here in the year that he was born – 1948. So he goes around NZ in their footsteps trying to locate hotels and theatres they stayed in. Fat chance most of them are torn down or out of business now. He tries to find out if anyone had met the Oliviers and still remembers them but most of them are dead.
This book is mostly a travel diary/moan about how NZ lost all it’s British heritage, and comes across as written by a poncy arrogant colonialist who acts like he once owned the country and bequeathed its culture and architecture. The book is rather slim pickings – he could have just read ‘Darlings of the Gods’ and saved his money…? There’s actually no backstage gossip or stuff about the tour IN the book. You can’t really go somewhere and expect the past to be preserved exactly as it was for you, especially in something as fleeting as a two week theatre tour (the Old Vic set up theatre in makeshift dressing rooms and town halls). He looked everywhere for the St James but totally missed out on the little theatre named after Vivien (still standing, but now used as a university resource centre) and well…that was pretty much it.
He did find a nun who remembers treating Olivier’s knee. Hooray. I now know what the meaning of ‘luvvie’ is.
By all means visit to NZ but don’t expect to find vestiges of the golden age of theatre here! (That’s why the Olivier’s came here in the first place…to give us a taste of theatrical tradition) a point lost on Mr Fallowell.
