Means To An Exit
Narrative Travel Nonfiction by Sean Rorison

Means To An Exit is a collection of travels built around themes, a body of juxtapositions, written with a literary voice. It tackles the initial euphoria of the “other place” and works itself through deeper issues until, finally, arriving at a point where the narrator must simply ask what it all means. Places starts with Sean Rorison's initial trip abroad, to New York City, and you better hope that nonfiction narratives on New York are good – and indeed it is. Intending to catch the reader's attention with a unique voice, he tackles this tall task first.

And that is the beginning – working through more urban places as a young traveller, giddy at the vastness of the world, Sean Rorison then visits Tokyo, Brisbane, Brasilia, Taipei, Leichtenstein, and Shanghai for more excitement and a study of the joy of drinking beer in other places. Places Arcs over the theme of youthful travel, hostel going, and sets the initial pace for the book.

Slow Decay throws a wrench into the simple notion of travelling fun – the world is not as it seems, the world has problems, there are many places where it is not so simple to be a stupid white traveller. Starting with an initial journey to Haiti, Sean Rorison begins to assemble his puzzle pieces in sequence: Port Moresby, Johannesburg, Phnom Penh, Bogota, Beirut, Sarajevo, and finally in Bucharest.

Cast Adrift is the natural progression from the dichotomy of good place/bad place. He has seen the good and the bad, is searching for the ugly, and is no longer simply visiting dots on the map – he is moving between them. Focusing on long road trips and no longer rooted in being the white guy from “over there”, he has become a man without a real sense of place, without a reference point. Building on this ambiguity, he goes through some rather obscure parts of the world: trying to leave Djibouti by land, Travelling by bus over the frontier into Somaliland not once but twice and being thrown in jail the second time, wandering about on foot in southern Taiwan, taking derelict buses through the heart of Albania, Hitchhiking in southern Africa, searching for a good spot to photograph the Northern Lights in Canada's Northwest Territories, Stuck sleeping on park benches in Milan, and stuck on a plane he can't disembark in Jeddah – he is a man without a home.

Deep Inside grows from this. Now a troubled soul, and also irate at the amount of reality he has seen versus the so-called 'reality' he has read in newspapers and books, he sets out to see those troubled parts of the world with his own eyes. Knowing he at least has some travel skills, he hits some major war zones and some well-forgotten ones, all the while tackling the notion of who should be allowed to visit these places, the concept of what is really going on versus what people want him to think is going on; and at the end, having an epiphany of perhaps how foolish it is to simply travel around looking for death and destruction. He visits Iraq, Kosovo, Northern Uganda and Eastern Congo, Palestine, Mogadishu, and finally Mauritania in purusuit of this.

And in the end, what does this all mean? Apotheosis focuses on this topic, as he works through the trailing ends of trips with his idle thoughts and desire to simply make sense of it. Searching for meaning through travel, some sort of enlightenment perhaps, though this spiritual aspect is more a cadence to the things he has witnessed and the places he has been. Again back into places where partying is the rule of the day, though he is less interested in partying – more intelligent, more wise, and some final thoughts on the ultimate end of a person who has travelled so much. He visits Nairobi, Swaziland, Ohio, Iqaluit, Angkor Wat, Miami Beach, Brasov, and Pretoria before a flight out.

All of this is presented with an attentive eye to literary style, something not seen enough in travel writing – particularily travel writing for warzones and backpacker's haunts, Sean Rorison brings a unique voice filled with a zest for description and storytelling. Indeed, in a book like this the style is what matters most intently, and Sean Rorison makes certain his style is closer to literary legends like Ryszard Kapuscinski than the weaker writing that plagues the memoirs of many journalists.

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