”How comforting it must be” she says ”to pass through life’s storms always with the thought of the group infusing every action

”How comforting it must be”, she says, ”to pass through life’s storms always with the thought of the group infusing every action and every thought with one voice extending from the time of one’s ancestors down through the generations saying, “It’s all right We are all here. There is no such thing as alone.” Indeed.The relationship between landscape and character is central to Davidson’s work, and she is strong on this notoriously treacherous stretch of the human landscape. Desert cultures, she writes, seldom have a word for thank you, because sharing is integral to survival. ”How could I explain”, Davidson says, ”that being alone in cities was my natural state?” Nobody in the dang really wants her, though they are all very keen on her money. When she hates India and its wretched poverty, endemic corruption and rude citizens, Davidson is brave enough to admit it.Intellectually and emotionally she struggles to understand the shifting sands of Rajasthani political culture and ”that Indian patience tempered through millennia”. Irredeemably different, when she tries to go into town alone the Rabari force her to hire servants.

Frustrated at every turn by cultural barriers as impenetrable as the Himalayas, Davidson discovers ”a reservoir of suspicion and fear”, and in order to survive she learns to effect a psychic disappearing act.When she set off she had 20 words in common with her new family, and her mute status bedevils the journey. In Desert Places Davidson takes herself off with a dang of the little-known Rabari tribe on their migratory cycle in Rajasthan and northern Gujarat, and she has a very bad time of it indeed. The death of a dog and the irritating existence of a photographer are leitmotifs of both books, but there the similarity ends. The first, Tracks, which tells the story of a solo camel traverse through the Australian desert, became an international bestseller and is currently being made into a film starring Julia Roberts. If the entire journey, however, is a trajectory of misery, the writer’s only hope lies in redemption, ”I may have had a vile time, but look what I learnt.”
You have to be a good writer to pull it off, and Robyn Davidson is almost up to the job Desert Places is her second travel book in sixteen years.

In the finest books of the genre, misadventures jostle for recognition: if it had been plain sailing from Peking to Kashmir Peter Fleming would have written a very dull account (Nothing Special to Report from Tartary), and had Apsley Cherry-Garrard been obliged to call his book The Most Comfortable Journey in the World we would have forgotten him long ago

A portion of adversity leavens the mix. Loving and Giving and Time After Time are published by Abacus at pounds 6.99 on 6 June. Disaster is the very stuff of life for the travel writer. It deserves to be re-read and enjoyed.Two of Molly Keane’s earlier novels, Treasure Hunt and Young Entry, have just been reissued this month by Virago at pounds 6.99 each.

Her final novel, Loving and Giving, depicts a beautiful young woman martyred to manners “When I look back, I am astonished,” she said then “I can only see it all as a myth. Mostly we had a divine time, but what about others? We simply never thought. Nowadays, when I meet very successful, sensitive young poets and reporters and painters, I often think – my God, in my day they would have been housemaids!”The straw of which Synge wrote has long been turned into bricks, and now the bricks have gone and all the people are dead; but the wild music made by the clash of manners, and by the reluctant entwining of the ruling classes and the rebel classes, remains a comic and compelling love story. Her Booker short-listed Good Behaviour, published when she was 76, stripped the last of the glamour from the big house, showing a world of petty cruelty and cultivated ignorance. Already, she was caricaturing her way of life in anticipation of its decline. Time After Time, her subsequent novel about aristocratic siblings growing old in a crumbling mansion is about the death of that world.