Book Review: A World Worth Seeing

There are books that make you want to immediately book a flight, pack a bag and disappear for six months. Then there are books that make you think, “well, that was a pleasant enough way to spend a Tuesday evening.” Brian Nelson’s A World Worth Seeing falls firmly into the second category, and I mean that as a gentle observation rather than a savage takedown.Nelson, it turns out, is quite extraordinarily well-travelled. The man has been practically everywhere. Not just the easy ones — your Parises and your New Yorks — but the sort of places that make your travel agent go quiet on the phone. Syria, which he visited before the whole thing descended into catastrophe. North Korea, which most people know mainly as a place you see on news programmes accompanied by footage of enormous military parades and men crying. Afghanistan, which, for obvious reasons, is not exactly on the average bucket list. The man has clearly got more stamps in his passport than sense, which, as a fellow traveller of advancing years, I mean as the highest possible compliment.The extraordinary thing is that he has crammed all of this into fewer than a hundred pages. One hundred pages. I have read instruction manuals for washing machines that were longer and considerably less entertaining. This compression of global adventure into a slim volume is either a remarkable feat of editorial discipline or a missed opportunity of some magnitude, and I found myself genuinely unsure which.It reminded me, rather, of the Reduced Shakespeare Company — that gloriously deranged theatrical troupe who perform the entire works of William Shakespeare in ninety minutes. They get through Hamlet in about eight minutes, Macbeth in slightly less, and the histories as a kind of extended football chant. It is tremendous fun, genuinely clever, and leaves you slightly winded. Nelson’s book produced an almost identical sensation. I read the whole thing across two evenings, which, given that I am the sort of person who needs three attempts to finish a newspaper on a Sunday, is saying something.