Brenda Pinkerton-Wesley, San Francisco, Monday 16th March 2026

Bandoxa: A Celtic Journey by Martyn de Tours

To delve deeper into the idiosyncratic architecture of Bandoxa is to engage with what the New Yorker might call a “cartography of the soul,” or what the TLS might more dryly label a “monograph on the instability of the self.” Martyn de Tours has not simply written a book; he has curated a museum of his own obsolescence and subsequent rebirth. It is a work that demands we look at the “thresholds” of our own lives with the same squint-eyed suspicion one might reserve for a suspicious character in a Berlin train station.

The Le Carréan Shadow: The Intelligence of the Ordinary

In the mid-section of the book, de Tours explores his “Project Years,” a period that reads like the dossier of a field agent who has spent too much time in the cold. There is a weary, cynical elegance to his descriptions of “Three Tales of Fire, Water, and Stone.” When he speaks of the “Sea That Screamed” in Minamata or the “Frozen Colossus” of Russia, he isn’t just recounting history; he is reporting from the front lines of a moral collapse.

As John le Carré famously wrote in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, “Intelligence work is just self-pity, if you’re not careful.” De Tours avoids this trap by pivoting toward the “anarchic humour” of the absurd. He treats his own career, his “shouting at printers” and navigating the “logic layers” of corporate reality, as a series of botched operations. He is the spy who realises that the “enemy” is not a foreign power, but the “synthetic transcendence” of a world that has forgotten how to breathe. He seeks a “quiet centre,” a place where the “still, small voice” of the Celtic fringe can finally be heard above the din of the digital age.

The Waugh-esque Comedy of Errors

The humour in Bandoxa is profoundly British; specifically, it is the humour of the “Bright Young Thing” grown old and wise, yet no less mischievous. There is a scene involving “grifting cats” and the “unruly” nature of Galician livestock that feels ripped from the pages of Scoop or Brideshead Revisited. De Tours possesses that Evelyn Waugh-like ability to find the divine in the ridiculous.

Waugh once noted that “To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.” For de Tours, this wisdom is extended to the landscape itself. His love for the “slate-colored skies” of Wales and the “unreasonably green” hills of Galicia is a romantic attachment that borders on the theological. He is a man who finds “wicked” joy in the fact that life is “well-worn into shape,” acknowledging that the “destination” is usually just a car park, but the journey, the “narrative”, is where the sanctity lies.

The Theroux-vian Displacement

Paul Theroux once remarked that “the person who stays at home and writes about his travels is a liar.” De Tours is no liar, but he is a master of displacement. He writes from his “little Canadian cabin,” looking back at Wales and Spain with the detached clarity of a man who has finally stepped off the treadmill. This distance allows him to see the “Walnut Tree Viaduct” of his youth not just as a piece of engineering, but as a bridge to a “preordained destiny.”

His travel is internal as much as external. He wanders into “Bandoxa” as one might wander into a dream, without a map, but with a keen sense of “ritual.” He understands that to truly see a place, one must be willing to become “invisible” within it. He rejects the “carpet-baggers” of modern tourism in favour of the “mossy truths” found by the River Mendo. His prose reflects this; it is meandering, tidal, and occasionally “completely bonkers,” refusing to adhere to the straight lines of a traditional travelogue.

The Shelley-esque Creation of the Self

Perhaps the most striking element of Bandoxa is its underlying Gothic current. There is a sense of the “monstrous” in the way de Tours describes the “transitioning” of his own identity. He is a creator who has assembled himself from the “memory salad” of different eras, different countries, and different versions of his own name.

Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein claimed, “I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body.” De Tours has spent a lifetime infusing life into the “inanimate” data of his existence. He treats his past, the “breath and coal dust” of 1956, as the raw material for a “time-machine.” He warns us that “the page itself fears what might be conjured,” suggesting that writing one’s life is an act of dangerous necromancy. He is not just telling a story; he is “raving against the dying of the light,” a Dylan Thomas-inspired defiance that gives the book its heart.

The Final Tally: A Masterclass in Being

In the end, Bandoxa is an “absolutely fabulous” achievement because it refuses to be useful. It is not a “how-to” guide for the corporate soul, nor is it a checklist for the aspirational traveller. Instead, it is a masterclass in being.

It is a book that occupies the “Grand Central of Everything,” where the “ritual” of a violin sighing in the firelight is given the same weight as the “Agendas” of global sustainability. De Tours reminds us that we are all “keepers of coins” and “watchers of skies,” caught in a “non-linear labyrinth” of our own making.

For the reader of the FT Weekend, it provides a necessary antidote to the rigours of the “logic layer.” For the New Yorker devotee, it offers a stylish, neurotic, and deeply human portrait of a life lived “out of focus.” And for the TLS scholar, it remains a tantalising puzzle of “myth and fact.”Martyn de Tours has reached the “last few chapters” and found that they are the ones where things finally “make sense” precisely because they have gone “completely bonkers.” It is a “wicked” conclusion to a “joyful, dreadful, and utterly confusing” journey. Diolch yn fawr, indeed. We are all the better for having shared the porch of that Canadian cabin, if only for a few hundred pages.

THE END