Full Tilt by Dervla Murphy (1965)
A Woman and Her Bike From Ireland to India
In 1963, Dervla Murphy - who would later make an entire career our of her travel writing - decided to depart on the journey she had resolved to take when she was just ten years old. For her tenth birthday, she received a bicycle and an atlas, and on that very day she set the goal to bike all the way from her home in Ireland to India. The result of this gruelling trip, which took over 4 months to complete, is Full Tilt.
Dervla Murphy's Upbringing
Dervla Murphy was born in 1931 in Lismore, Co. Waterford in Ireland. She always wanted to travel - as is made clear by her ambitious goal to cycle to India - but spent a great majority of her young adult life caring for her ailing mother. She satisfied her taste for adventure with short trips to various parts of Europe until her mother passed away, leaving her free to go wherever she pleased.
Since Full Tilt, Dervla Murphy has published over twenty more travel novels, her latest being The Island that Dared in 2008, which chronicles her recent travels to Cuba with her family.
The Structure of Full Tilt
Full Tilt is essentially the published version of Murphy's journals, which she kept fastidiously throughout her travels from Ireland to India. For the most part, the reader gets a day-to-day glimpse of her journey. She is so devoted to her journal-keeping that if she misses a day, she always explains why in her next entry.
Although Murphy has a charmingly quirky personality, it is not fairly reflected in her journal. Her entries are quite systematic, always following a similar reporting pattern. She starts with where she is, the date, and then moves onto when she rose, what she had for breakfast, and how many miles she travelled during the day. This is usually followed by where she has ended up and what she had for dinner.
Journal Entries Lack Tension, Anticipation, Excitement
Despite the fact that Dervla Murphy experienced and overcame many extraordinary obstacles (biking through blizzards, being attacked by wolves, almost raped, and dangerously sunburned, to name a very few), her style of writing is quite flat and therefore diminishes any worry or excitement the reader may naturally want to feel. She skims over near-death experiences from one sentence to another, adding no detail or emotion to her descriptions - she approaches other experiences with death (like finding a murdered man somewhere along the way) with equal detachment.
In addition to her writing style, her chosen structure - that of the daily journal entries - becomes quite tiresome quite early on in the book. And while her travels are inherently interesting, the book is lacking an overall narrative arc to keep the reader engaged.
On top of everything, after reading straight through to the end to find out "what happens," so to speak, you will be bitterly disappointed to find that Full Tilt practically ends mid-sentence. The rest of Dervla's journey has to be delayed by a number of months, and the way it is written, that is that. She has no more to share.
While interesting as a study of travel writing, and intriguing for the circumstances, Dervla Murphy's Full Tilt is ultimately quite anti-climatic and slightly disappointing.
Full Tilt by Dervla Murphy
Overlook Press, 1987
ISBN: 0879512482
Dervla Murphy travels from Ireland to India
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