Travelling in the footsteps of author John Steinbeck

Michael Kerr examines a journey across America in the footsteps of one of its greatest authors

"What are Americans like today?"

That is the question John Steinbeck wanted to answer when he hit the road in 1960. He was 58, failing in health and literary powers, and felt out of touch with the "monster land" that had inspired his fiction. The result, Travels with Charley, his last substantial work, was a bestseller and is still - despite recent debates over its truthfulness - being shifted in sizeable quantities.

Half a century on, Geert Mak, a journalist and historian, has set out to repeat Steinbeck's journey "with today's eyes and ears". Mak is Dutch, but America has been his "secret love" since 1978, when he stayed with a couple in Berkeley, California. They provided both bed and sounding board when he returned as a reporter in the '80s and '90s to cover everything from elections to drug wars.

Mak feels himself to be following in a tradition of outsiders, from Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s to Jonathan Raban in the '80s, who have arrived from the old world to report on the new. But he is a little daunted. "What," he asks, "could I possibly add?"

The most obvious answer is pages. The paperback of Travels with Charley comes in at 210; In America: Travels with John Steinbeck fills 550, including afterword, acknowledgements, epilogues (two), bibliography and index. Has Mak forgotten that Steinbeck's rear tyre blew because he "carried too much of everything"?

Steinbeck had a converted green GMC pickup truck named Rocinante, after Don Quixote's horse, and travelled, according to his own account, with an old French gentleman poodle - Charley.

Mak has a silver Jeep and is accompanied by Sandy the satnav and his wife Mietsie - despite Steinbeck's advice that "two or more people disturb the ecologic [sic] complex of an area".

But then Steinbeck ignored that advice. Although he portrays himself in Travels as solitary, often pining for home and his wife, it's likely that Elaine Steinbeck was with him for at least half of his two-and-a-half months on the road.

Steinbeck has taken a posthumous whipping on the grounds that he presented fiction as non-fiction. The route described in Travels diverges regularly from places and dates given in letters he wrote along the way. Incidents are sometimes too good to be true, conversations too rounded or stagey. The book, though, as Mak himself sums it up, is "full of colours and human voices, witty and nimble".

Steinbeck was ahead of his time in his worries over what we now call "the environment", and both frank and sound on racism and what would come of it. Travels can still be read with pleasure, if more caution, 50 years on.

Mak says his is an account of two journeys, Steinbeck's and his own in 2010.

Steinbeck is on the road halfway down page 18. Mak doesn't get moving until page 36. Each time he's getting up speed, he pulls into a metaphorical rest stop, to draw on his research into everything from the military-industrial complex to feminism.

From early on, Mak the historian has the upper hand over Mak the journalist, which is a shame, for he's a good reporter and phrasemaker ("a sermon stiff enough to stand a spoon in"). He could have made more of people met on the road, among them a first-hand witness of the dust storms that turned starving families into migrants and inspired Steinbeck to write The Grapes of Wrath.

Rereading Travels with Charley, I had an image halfway through of Steinbeck, increasingly driven not by his search but by editorial deadlines, putting his foot down and hurtling to the finish. Reading Mak, I pictured the writer, surrounded by books and papers, trying to pull out of a library. Mak may be more dependable on the facts, but as Steinbeck himself has observed, "in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger".

In America: Travels with John Steinbeck by Geert Mak. Vintage . R582 at exclusives.co.za

© - The Daily Telegraph