I remember coming across the work of Allen Abel soon after the Globe and Mail posted him to China in 1983. His informative dispatches were written with quirky humour and a sideways way of seeing, and I thought, now here’s a rarity, a journalist who is also a writer.
The distinction between writing and journalism is all too apparent in Abel’s Outback, and it has to do, in large measure, with the word count within which Abel is forced to work. Most are of the 39 pieces collected here are of the vignette variety (1,000 words or less) and are simply too brief, too imaginitively constraining, for such a good writer. Nowhere is this shortness of breath more apparent than in his dispatches from the Middle East: the three pieces barely get started before glibly concluding.
It’s a pity Abel didn’t extend many of the journalistic snapshots into full-length portraits for book publication. The best pieces in Abel’s Outback are extended essays that delve into what it means to be human on the edge of the second millennium. The best of the essays is “The Lost Worlds of the Kalahari,” which evokes the work of George Orwell both in its descriptive power and its haunting tale of lost language. Other highlights include “In Search of the Year 1000,” which begins at the magnificent Burgundian cathedral of Autu, where the abbé calms people “with tales of the the turn of the first millennium.” And then there’s the author travelling down the Amazon with the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin.
In the best of all possible worlds, Abel would be a full-time author rather than a journalist. But in a world where language matters less each day, good writers have to make a living.