In Review: Sean and David’s Long Drive

Sean Condon is a master of the quick quip, an eye-catching headline, and a connoisseur of the finest pomades*. As a young copywriter in an unnamed Australian advertising agency, Sean was bored, disillusioned, and desperate for a change in his environment, and his life. His answer? To undertake a long drive around Australia with his mate David O’Brien.

The result of their 6-7 week odyssey is what constitutes Sean + David’s Long Drive (Lonely Planet Publications, 1996. Republished 2009). In fact, the book is essentially a reproduction of the daily diary Sean kept throughout the trip.

To be precise, their trip didn’t take them around Australia per se, but through the centre of the continent. Roughly, the route they followed went thus (see map): [E]Melbourne to Adelaide (via the Great Ocean Road), then Alice Springs, Uluru (Ayers Rock), Tennant Creek, [B]Darwin, Tennant Creek (again), Mount Isa, Townsville, [C]Cairns, Townsville (again), then down the east coast of Australia taking in Surfers Paradise, Brisbane, [D]Sydney, Canberra, and finally back to [E]Melbourne. Whew! If that seems like a long way – it is. Over eleven thousand kilometres in fact.

Incredibly, Sean Condon didn’t drive even one kilometre of that total distance. It seems he doesn’t drive (or at least he didn’t at the time he and David undertook their journey), which meant that David O’Brien had to drive every one of those eleven thousand plus kilometres.

Sean Condon is a graduate of the Bill Bryson School of Travel Writing. (Actually, I just made that up. To my knowledge there is no actual BBSoTW, but if there was, Sean would surely have been a graduate of the Class of ‘96).

Sean, like Bryson has an acerbic wit, a talent for focusing on the odd, the banal, and the ridiculous as they travel across continents, and a talent too for writing about them with humor and occasionally something bordering on compassion and empathy.

Condon, I guess would be labelled a Generation X-er (he was born in 1965), and presumably he reflects the thinking – and lives the lifestyle – of that generation of thirty-something’s that are lumped within that catch-all label. Sean and David spend much of their down time (when not actually on the road), boozing, smoking, eating junk food, womanising, and boozing some more.

Come to think of it, they spend much of their driving time indulging in the same practices as well.

The book is not a travelogue in the usual sense of the word. If you are looking for specific information and advice about say, Alice Springs, or Darwin, or Charters Towers, you are only going to get the briefest glimpse from Sean + David’s Long Drive. A peak behind the curtain, so to speak. Partly this is because Australia – especially the interior, or ‘outback’ – is so vast, flat, and featureless, that the landscape seemingly never changes for hundreds of miles.

To break the monotony and boredom of the trip, Sean and David engage in small talk – lots of it – that covers their favourite music and bands, women they have known, and television shows that Gen X-ers grew up on. Shows such as the Brady Bunch, Scooby Doo, and other such fare.

I don’t think I learned anything new about Australia that I didn’t already know, and I learned a lot about Sean that I didn’t need to know. While the book is entertaining enough and easily digested, Sean’s humor and jaundiced view of the journey began to grate on me after a while, and it was all I could do to finish the book. Having said that, I must admit that Bill Bryson’s writing can have the same effect on me, so maybe the problem lies with me, and not with Sean Condon – or Bill Bryson.

I suppose that’s a roundabout way of saying, if you like Bill Bryson’s writing, you will like Sean + David’s Long Drive as well.

Details:
Paperback: 296 pages
Publisher: Lonely Planet; 2nd edition (February 1, 2009)
ISBN-10: 9781741795226
ISBN-13: 978-1741795226
ASIN: 1741795222

-o0o-

*Pomade
— n
1. a perfumed oil or ointment put on the hair, as to make it smooth and shiny
[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Pomade]

-o0o-

Purchase Sean + David's Long Drive from Amazon.Com as well as other books written by Sean Condon via the links below.

Friday Foto – Tradesmen’s Entrance

I spotted this sign on the gate of a large property as I wandered through the streets of the London suburb of Kensington, one spring day in March 2008. I hope this sign, and the class society it represents, is a relic of a distant past, and that tradespeople and servants are now able to enter the building in question via the front door, rather than be required to enter through a rear entrance.

The building in question, Cromwell Mansions, and the sign itself (at lower right) can be seen below in this screen shot taken from Google Maps. The address is 217-239, Cromwell Road, Kensington, London.

-o0o-

Web of The Week - Shakespeare and Company



Screenshot of Shakespeare and Company website

Shakespeare and Company is an independent bookstore located opposite Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris's Left Bank. Originally established in 1919 by Sylvia Beach, the store became a gathering place for writers such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, William S. Burroughs, James Joyce and Ford Madox Ford. So great is the list of great writers who have passed through its doors or spent time living on its upper floors, that Shakespeare and Company has grown from a bookstore into an institution.

During the pre-war years the store was considered the centre of Anglo-American literary culture in Paris, which saw writers and artists of the "Lost Generation," spending a great deal of time at Shakespeare and Company. In fact, it was Sylvia Beach who initially published James Joyce's book Ulysses in 1922, which was subsequently banned in the United States and in the United Kingdom.

Shakespeare and Company has always been more than just a bookstore. From the beginning the shop included kitchen and sleeping facilities, and even today, volunteer workers are able to stay in the store, working, reading, writing and discussing literary ideas, theories, and more. After Sylvia Beach’s death the store was taken over by George Whitman, and following his passing, the store is now run by his daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman.

The home page for the website has the very unusual characteristic of loading something different every time you press the F5 (or Refresh) key. In deed, the scrapbook nature of the layout, featuring multiple images and scraps of writing, leads to a cornucopia of other images that seem to lead off in an endless and haphazard way into the bowels of the site. It is impossible to know how many layers deep the site goes, which makes exploring Shakespeare and Company either endlessly frustrating, or infinitely fascinating. It all depends on how you approach it.

More Information
A 2005, fifty-two minute documentary film about Shakespeare and Company, Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man, can be seen here in its entirety...

Shakespeare and Company on Wikipedia…

The shop was featured in the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris.

-o0o-