Full of posturing

As someone once employed by a travel magazine, I might be expected to bridle at Chuck Thompson&rsquos thesis that travel writers are, generally speaking, hacks so fond of the sops tossed their way by the travel industry that they are happy to toe the party line and so bereft of ability that they toe it in prose the equivalent of the glazed grins and anodyne blandishments characteristic of service in the average American supermarket. And bridle I do. But not at the slights to my integrity. Anyone who has spent any time at a travel magazine, and Thompson has been in the business for over a decade, will concede the compromises, the corners cut, the oleaginous articles that are the inevitable result of marketing departments beholden to advertisers, penny-pinching publishers, skittish editors and expendable writers. What I bridle at is Thompson&rsquos posturing. His book, like the magazines and the industry he derides, is dishonest at its core, a not particularly artful swindle of the paying customer.

Chuck Thompson, the back cover of Smile When You&rsquore Lying attests, is the &ldquoguy who knows the truth about travel&rdquo. In the introduction, portentously titled &lsquoYou Deserve Better&rsquo, he describes his book as a &ldquosmall effort to correct the travel industry&rsquos bias against candour and honesty.&rdquo But Smile When You&rsquore Lying is no cogently argued polemic, no &lsquorogue&rsquo travel writer&rsquos cri de coeur. The promised exposé is the hook, the gimmick that makes this desultory collection of laddish anecdotes and scattershot screeds relevant and presumably publishable. The targets of Thompson&rsquos galumphing sarcasm are inflight magazines, purple prose clich&eacutes, Lonely Planet, Paul Theroux and the &ldquotravel industry&rsquos remorseless demand for gloss&rdquo. Surely accusing inflight magazines of lacking editorial integrity and lambasting underpaid freelancers on tight deadlines for resorting to shorthand are slim pickings for so stridently self-proclaimed an iconoclast. Much of his argument is reheated pabulum Thomas Swick covered the same ground more elegantly, particularly the tepid tone of most travel pieces, in his essay &lsquoRoads Not Taken&rsquo, published nearly five years ago in the Columbia Journalism Review. 

&ldquoAlmost all magazines,&rdquo Thompson writes, with the zeal of a man who only ten minutes before had been shouting &lsquoEureka&rsquo in the bath, &ldquoexist for a single purpose... to sell shit.&rdquo This insight is wrung from a swiftly aborted stint as editor in chief of Travelocity, the newsstand magazine of a popular website. Travelocity folded after a year and Thompson&rsquos account of his time there will intrigue and likely horrify anyone with a passing interest in the workings of a magazine. It&rsquos hard not to sympathise with Thompson, saddled with a marketing department that foists a highly paid consultant on him two weeks before the launch. The consultant, with Thompsonian acuity, announces that &ldquosex sells&rdquo, thus persuading the marketing department to insist that a bikini-clad lovely be featured on every cover, eventually leading to a sexual harrassment lawsuit.