Book Review: Lost Oasis

The Gazette (Review by Paul Carbray)

Lost Oasis by Robert Twigger, Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Viewers of the movie The English Patient and readers of the book of the same name will recall Count Laszlo de Almasy, played by Ralph Fiennes. In real life, Almasy was a Hungarian fascist and a renowned desert explorer in Egypt and Sudan. He later became the first director of the Cairo Desert Institute.

Almasy, like some other desert explorers, such as Harding King and Ralph Bagnold, spent time searching for the fabled oasis of Zerzura, with its paradise of treasure, flocks of birds and lush valley. Zerzura, Twigger admits, is unlikely to exist, but nevertheless it "drove the exploration of the eastern Sahara."

But Twigger's search for the lost oasis is merely a pretext. He is fascinated by the desert itself, driven to collect maps, books and scholarly reports on an area he says is as bleak as Antarctica, and just as hostile to man.

The author abandoned his verdant England to accompany his Egyptian wife to Cairo, burdened by debt and anxious to find "vastness in the face of human confusion and brain fatigue."

Frankly, not a lot of desert exploration happens in Lost Oasis. Yes, Twigger does make one brief expedition by automobile into the desert in a tour led by a megalomaniac guide. He then buys a car and sets out, a quest doomed by Twigger's mechanical ineptitude and the fact he's too cheap (or broke) to buy a reliable desert vehicle.

See the above page for the full review. I do have the Twigger book on my shelves, but didn't get beyond the first chapter, because I found it too much of an autobiography when what I was looking for was more of a documentary. I daresay I'll get back to it eventually.

I am mid way through Saul Kelly's The Lost Oasis: the Desert War and the Hunt for Zerzura, which I am enjoying enormously. I strangely lost the knack of reading fiction a few years ago, so it is always welcome to find something which entertains and informs at the same time. Other books on a similar theme that may be of interest are Justin Marozzi's South from Barbary, and Douglas Porch's The Conquest of The Sahara.

And if you are a desert nut (which I am) the tremendous Sahara user-manual by Chris Scott, Sahara Overland: A route and planning guide is one of the best things I have read in years. I had to wrestle it away from my father to return it to London with me yesterday. It contains 672 pages of information - everything from how to dig your car out of a sand dune and how best to ride a motorbike through the desert, to what sort of GPS receiver you should look to buy and which satellite phone will bankrupt you the least. Some of his reviews of some of the other books about the Sahara (good and bad) made me laugh out loud. I stumbled across this quite by accident in Foyles in London (U.K.) but it is available from Amazon and other online retailers.