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Rating: 
Summary: Fraank autobiography describing a varied life.
Review: The subtitle of this autobiography is "Memoirs of People and Places". The author states that he has always been more interested in people than in places. This interest does not preclude him from giving graphic descriptions of the many countries he has lived in: Iraq, Japan, Morocco, Egypt, Cyprus, Thailand; and also of those he has visited: China, Russia, Sarawak, Sri Lanka, Laos, India, Libya. Being a writer of fiction ( A Touch of the Orient, Uneasy Relations, Doubtful Partners ) he has the novelist's observing eye, and his observations are often entertaining. About the manager of a hotel in Baghdad he has written: "Mr. Yousef was a little man with a boiled-lobster, pock-marked face, and not much hair grew on his small head. His blue eyes were close to his podgy, pitted nose, and his perpetual, twisted smile revealed large yellow teeth. More often than not he was tipsy, even before lunch . . . He would wobble about the hotel lobby like a marionette with a few broken strings, smiling inanely. He was not an unpleasant man, in fact he was a kind one . . ." Going up the Rajang River in Sarawak, he says: " The river was magnificent, powerful, mysterious; mysterious because of the banks shrouded by dark-green jungle, it brown opaqueness, its swift, strong, silent movement, its emptiness. Only rarely did we see another longboat and then it was little more than a speck hugging the other bank.: The title of the book comes from a hotel in Port Said: "Its name caught my fancy the first time I stayed there in the 1940's. My life has been a sort of exchange with the East; an unfair one, perhaps, because I feel I have given less to the East than the East has given to me." Haylock taught English in Baghdad and in Tokyo. He stated that the happiest time of his life was from 1975 - 1984 when he was back in Tokyo "with a well-paid university post, reasonable accommodation, and a wonderful Japanese friend". The author is candid about his tastes. In between teaching there were gaps during which he stayed in various lands (Morocco, Cyprus, Portugal) and visited China and the USSR, as it still was in 1971. In China in 1965, just before the Cultural Revolution, "at the height of the cult, one might say of the deification of Mao Tse-Tung", he was in the stern hands of hard-line guides, who constantly poured tedious propaganda into his unwilling ears. He crossed Siberia by train, having to share a compartment with a ninety-three-year-old Australian woman, who died on the way. Her death was wrongly diagnosed as being due to Cholera and Haylock and the other passengers in the carriage were at Sverdlosk taken off the train and confined in an isolation hospital for several days. The author states "for much of my life I have lived in blissful ignorance in the countries I have inhabited. As an expatriate I have escaped the responsibilities, but not the taxes, which those who properly belong have to shoulder. I have enjoyed being an escapist". Perhaps the author would have written a deeper and less light-hearted book if he had properly belonged. This frank autobiography describes his life, not of adventure, but a varied one full of amusing encounters and unusual situations.
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