Aegean beauty: the crazy world of Nigel McGilchrist

The poet Louis MacNeice wrote: "World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural." Not if the travel industry had anything to do with it. They don't like crazy, they don't like plural and they certainly don't like incorrigible. It's not what the punters want.

What the punters want has been described by some unsung genius as "home plus". People want everything they're used to at home, plus sun, sea, sex, cheap wine, mountains, spicy food, dancing girls, you name it.

"Home minus" is also true, though. Where we go is not just what we're travelling to, but also what we're escaping from: homogeneity, McDonalds, health and safety, good taste, Toilet Duck, sell-by dates, and all the slightly purse-lipped timidity which keeps our potential for anarchic good humour at bay.

But it's getting harder to find. The world has become steadily less crazy - and therefore less interesting - under the profit-focused eye of the tourist trade, the uniform awfulness of charter fllghts and budget airlines, and the flattening beer-and-backpacker thump of Lonely Planet and the Rough Guides.

There are still occasional oases of idiosyncrasy around, though, and my new travelling hero is Nigel McGilchrist, art historian and former director of the Anglo-Italian Institute in Rome.

He is not only a hero to lovers of the diverse and idiosyncratic world. He's also a reproach to the doomy cowards of the publishing industry, running scared and handing over their editorial judgment to sales reps with computers and to the man from Tesco - a nice chap; I've met him - who can make or break a writer in these evil times.

McGilchrist was commissioned in 2003 to write a book on the Aegean islands for the immensely respectable Blue Guide series. I suppose they were expecting the usual 75,000 words in the usual 12 to 18 months.

What they got, five years later, was 600,000 words. That - I've just measured it - is a foot of books.

The blood must have drained from Blue Guide's collective face when McGilchrist's manuscript arrived. Hundreds of blue pencils later, they'd got it down to size but McGilchrist wasn't having it. In a labour of love - and of the sort of obduracy which makes one proud to be British - he bought the manuscript back and published, on his own account, a sort of director's cut: the unexpurgated 600,000 words - 20 volumes at £9.99 a pop or a bargain £150 if you buy the set from his website.

The books, of course, are splendid. It's proper, eccentric, British travel-writing. He goes everywhere except Crete (which had already been done in the Blue Guides) and Corfu and the Ionian (which he may get round to). He cranks along regardless of pouring rain or frying heat.
 
The only way he could get to some places was to swim. (Anyone who has had more than a passing acquaintance with the Greek ferry system will see his point, having already concluded that the only reliable way to get to most places is to swim.)

His knowledge of classical antiquity is comprehensive, but McGilchrist's Greek Islands is no dry tome for the culturally anxious. His eye misses no glimpse of natural beauty and his stomach leads him through perils and dangers to that perfect taverna which, in McGilchrist (for, like Baedeker, his books deserve to be eponymous), really is unspoiled and off the beaten track.

Every ounce of commonsense says it should have pictures and helpful hints on what to do if you get diarrhoea and how to work the phones (they don't) and, really, should be downloadable onto your Kindle. But in a week where authors have suddenly started yelling about their rights being pirated, it's reassuring to see McGilchrist sticking to good old-fashioned paper.

There are three great achievements to be laid at McGilchrist's door. He's stood up for the integrity of his text. He's stood apart from the abroad-as-consumer-product ethos of the vast and flattening travel industry. And he's done it without dumbing down, comprehensively, and on paper.

Odd to be applauding that, here in an online publication; but it is a fine and righteous blow for incorrigible plurality. The globalised world is the tiniest bit crazier again, and for that, as much as for his books themselves, McGilchrist deserves our thanks.

• McGilchrist's Greek Islands by Nigel McGilchrist, Genius Loci. www.mcgilchristsgreekislands.com ISBN 978-1-907859-20-5 ·