The good points are that Chatwin's considerable intellect and narrative capacities weave a story based on year's travel experience. The bad point is that he knew almost nothing about his subject and as such has written an Englishman's compassionate contemporary account of the colonies.

I live and work on a remote aboriginal community near the areas Chatwin visited. Traditional Aborignal law is an amazingly complex oral culture so rich in history and symbolism that I have profound doubts about any whitefella ever properly understanding it, let alone a visiting foreigner desperately looking for something.

This is a great book, but don't think by reading it you will get a terrifically accurate profile of what being an aborigine is, whatever that means. They are not, as Chatwin seems to deduce, another group of nomadic noble savages more fulfilled than the more sedentary post-agriculture communitites.

63 of 66 found the following review helpful:


Amazing and important  Jan 07, 2003 By Carper
This is a difficult book to describe: it masquerades as a Theroux style travelogue, but is anything but. I love Paul Theroux, but this totally transcends his travel writing. Chatwin starts out describing a trip to the Australian Outback. It starts out pretty conventional, in beautiful descriptive prose...but before too long you realize you are actually reading Chatwin's brilliant ruminations about the human race as a species, where we came from, and where we are going. The book is NOT really about the Aborigines, though they provide a number of terrific characters, and I suspect someone who really wanted to know more about the actual Songlines could be disappointed by this book. He very clearly sets up his own views against those of many important and popular thinkers. To sum it up, he makes a case that humans are not really an aggressive species at heart, and that evolution has not really programmed the human to fight for power but to defend the tribe. Not every will agree with this, but he makes a wonderful case and the book is beautiful and crystalline and should be read by everyone.

32 of 32 found the following review helpful:


Much more than a travel book  Mar 27, 2000 By Boris Bangemann "boyse"
William James said that to "learn the secrets of any science, we go to expert specialists, even though they may be eccentric persons, and not to commonplace pupils." It seems, Bruce Chatwin used the same method to shed light on what for him was the question of questions: the nature of human restlessness.

The Songlines consists of the stories of the eccentric experts in the science of restlessness Chatwin met in Western Australia, and notebook entries ranging from Blaise Pascal's philosophical reflections to a meeting with Konrad Lorenz in Austria. Chatwin had originally intended to use these notebook entries for a book on nomads. He gave up the project but the entries reveal the man and his quest.

In a way, The Songlines is Chatwin's own songline: a track which tells of what he found on his wanderings, and what he considered worth singing.

22 of 22 found the following review helpful:


Anthropological "pensees" leave you wanting more story  Mar 27, 1999
This book starts out with a kind of nice, floating narrative about a meandering trip through Australia's outback. You get a candid look at Aborigines and their land rights movement in a way that's not at all preachy but rather funny. Unfortunately, just as I was starting to care about where the characters were going and what would happen to them, Chatwin treats us to page after page of "pensees," his own and others', on the subjects of nomadism and other topics in cultural and physical anthropology. I was an anthropology major, so I enjoyed many of his ideas, but found some of his main premises to be preposterous... For example, pastoral peoples are notoriously anything but pastoral, being extremely xenophobic and violent as a rule. Chatwin seems to be trying to convince us that the Aboriginals are peaceful and sweet because they roam around a lot... well, maybe. But I don't know that I needed fifteen pages of one-paragraph "thoughts" to state the point. Honestly, I couldn't help skipping pages to get back to the narrative. I understand where Chatwin was coming from with his "pensees" format, but Pascal he is not. Still, if you want a little food for thought, you might enjoy it. If you're looking for a narrative, forget it. Unlike the aborigines, whose travels have purpose and wonderful stories, Chatwin's narrative just kind of ambles around in the dust.

18 of 19 found the following review helpful:


A desperate last shot at meaning by a fellow who cared  Feb 08, 2001 By Daniel Myers
To really understand this book, of course, you have to understand that Chatwin knew he was dying of AIDS when he wrote it. Hence, (I think) the notes (which have raised so many pros and cons and head-scratchings among reviewers) tacked on at the end. He, sadly, was sinking fast and needed something to round out the book. The book, then, is not so much about the aborigines (which, as one reviewer has noted, it would be better to check out an Anthropolgy text on) as it is about the ailing Chatwin.-But who was Chatwin? I think he was primarily a) an erudite hyper-aesthete (He started out working for museums); and b) an unflagging disciple of Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher whose most famous dictum was "Everything is fire." In other words, everything is in constant change. Everything is on the move. Everything is being consumed and reborn. Whether it looks that way or not. As the poet Delmore Schwartz put it, "Time is the school in which we learn, that Time is the fire in which we burn."-This is why,I think the aborigines grabbed hold of his imagination at the end of his life, "Aboriginals,in general, had the idea that all "goods" were potentialy malign and would work against their possessors unless they were forever in motion." And, like Heraclitus, he inveighs against the members of his own race, "The whites were forever changing the world to fit their doubtful vision of the future."-But what was Chatwin's vision of the future? What did he expect to find out there in his dying days?-I think he gives the answer on page 293, the penultimate page of the book, where he writes, "...the mystics believe the ideal man shall walk himself to a 'right death.' He who has arrived 'goes back.' In Aboriginal Australia, there are specific rules for 'going back' or, rather, for singing your way to where you belong: to your 'conception site', to the place where your tjuringa is stored. Only then can you become-or re-become-the Ancestor. The concept is quite similar to Heraclitus's mysterious dictum,'Mortals and immortals, alive in their death, dead in each other's life."---I'm not at all sure exactly what this passage means. But the basic idea, I think, is that you keep moving down your songline or metaphysical groove or whatever until you die where you belong and thus rebegin a ghostly cycle of reincarnation. Chatwin's tone in quoting the Aboriginal beliefs and Heraclitus give us no clue as to how much of this he actually believed...But we do know from his life that he was always walking, always searching up to the very end.-Reading the book with this knowledge lends to it (despite the jumble it is that caused my four star review) an almost heroic quality.-So read it and be inspired!

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