Joel Magarey: Exposure: A Journey. Wakefield Press, 2009. ISBN 97818625448237. Website
For his first 12 years Joel Magarey believed he was Jesus, 'the Son of the Most High'. Even when reality bit with the onset of puberty, he retained his immortal longing, and it is the intensity of his experience that lends this sometimes boyish tale of growth, journeying, love and obsession a depth and seriousness that lifts it out of any conventional travel genre.
'Hunger' is his word for the impulse to seek out the numinous. As a boy, on a coastal bay of South Australia, sitting astride a rock pillar like a cadet Simeon Stylites, he followed that impulse and recognised its pitch:
Often, during summer dusks as I sat on the pillar ... following the slow rise of an orange moon, I'd hear the sound of a note playing on the air ... Sometimes that haunting sound, the embrace of the warm wind, and the dark passion of the raging waves would gradually invade me until my thoughts had faded away, and in that darkness I would feel the presence of a force or power, a living presence it felt like — yes, it was the living presence of the universe, humming through the wind and the waves and the ocean and the island and all things.
That feeling, a pressing, often painful awareness of the sacredness of the natural world and of the human lives lived in accordance with its imperatives, is the dominant tone of Magarey's storytelling. But it's a tone interrupted, distorted and sometimes drowned out by the compulsions that drive a young man as he travels in order to feed or escape his capricious demons.
Exposure is part memoir, part travelogue, and part apologia: a hybrid 'tracking across the hurtling world' narrative that traces Magarey's many youthful journeys, physical and psychological. There is more than a touch of the Tom Jones in his sexual meanderings, and a bathetic absurdity in his ambition to sample a multicultural smorgasbord. What he enjoys in Ecuador — if that is the word for such highly-strung and Catholic-guilt-infused sexual dabblings — you won't find in the Lonely Planet Guide.
It is also the diary of a young man suffering from a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which manifests in excruciating symptoms. There is his inability to make decisions (hence the weeks wasted in Los Angeles while he chases the