The Anatomy of Arcadia

The Anatomy of Arcadia by David Solway (Véhicule Press) pretends to be an anti-travel book, written against the grain of the "usual" travel book, but is really an anti-travel-guide-book filled with hard words that seem to be inserted into the text for no other reason than to vex even readers who are not afraid of hard words. On a single page, for example, we encounter replevin, lupercalian and detunicating. And what are we to do with a paragraph that contains not only purfled, but ipsissimosity? Buried under this arcane word-hoard there is a pretty good story, and an interesting story it would be, were it to have been cast in the plain English that Samuel Johnson (whom Solway invokes in an epigraph), on his good days, strove so mightily to demonstrate.