Bandoxa: A Journey Through Mist and Memory – Book Review

16 Mon Mar 2026

Posted by Martyn Jones in Inform, educate and entertain.

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Jersey Wetherspoon, New York, Monday 16th March 2026

Review of Bandoxa: A Celtic Journey by Martyn de Tours

There are travel books that catalogue places, and there are those rarer works that explore the geography of the mind. Bandoxa: A Celtic Journey belongs firmly to the latter tradition. It is a book that wanders across landscapes, languages, histories, and memories, with the reflective restlessness that has characterised the finest travel writing for more than two centuries.

From the opening pages, Martyn de Tours situates the reader not merely in a location but in an atmosphere: a mist-laden, half-imagined territory where Wales, Galicia, memory, and myth converge. The book begins with an invocation of place that feels less like orientation than enchantment. Bandoxa itself becomes a symbolic landscape, a mental territory as much as a geographical one, where rivers murmur stories and time moves in looping spirals rather than straight lines.

In this sense, the book sits comfortably within the lineage of travel literature shaped by writers who understood that journeying is rarely about distance alone. As the great Victorian traveller Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.” De Tours takes that maxim seriously. His narrative does not rush toward conclusions; it lingers in digressions, anecdotes, and recollections, allowing the reader to wander alongside him through decades of experience.

A Celtic Sensibility

What distinguishes Bandoxa most strikingly is its deeply Celtic sensibility. The Welsh imagination, melancholic, lyrical, and occasionally mischievous, permeates the text. Valleys echo with memory, viaducts become mythic structures, and robins carry messages from the departed.

De Tours writes of childhood in Caerphilly, of the vanished Walnut Tree Viaduct, of grandparents who seem to belong as much to folklore as to biography. The effect is reminiscent of the poetic geography found in the work of Jan Morris, who once observed that Wales is “a land of memory where past and present converse without embarrassment.”

Yet the author’s vision stretches beyond Wales. Galicia, Madrid, Mallorca, and the cities of Europe appear throughout the book like stations on an intellectual pilgrimage. These places are not merely destinations; they are chapters in a life shaped by curiosity, music, politics, language, and the restless search for meaning.

Travel as Memory

Travel writing has always been closely allied with memoir, but in Bandoxa the two forms fuse completely. The author moves freely between past and present, between childhood recollection and philosophical reflection.

This fluid treatment of time evokes the tradition of reflective travel literature pioneered by writers such as Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose own journeys across Europe blended scholarship, humour, and personal history. Leigh Fermor famously remarked that “travel is a part of education,” and de Tours’ narrative offers precisely that: a lifelong education conducted across landscapes both literal and intellectual.

School projects about Welsh rebellion, environmental catastrophe, and Soviet history become turning points in the author’s intellectual development. A conversation about religion unfolds between a rabbi, a priest, and an imam. A memory of a band rehearsal turns into a meditation on the roads not taken. These digressions might appear eccentric in another writer’s hands; here, they feel integral to the spirit of wandering inquiry that defines the book.

A Conversation with the Great Travellers

The most pleasurable travel books often feel like conversations with earlier travellers, and Bandoxa participates enthusiastically in that tradition. One hears faint echoes of Bruce Chatwin, whose belief that “the journey, not the arrival, matters” shaped modern travel writing.

Like Chatwin, de Tours is fascinated by the stories embedded in landscapes: abandoned bars in rural Galicia, long-demolished Welsh viaducts, forgotten libraries, and railway stations of memory. Each becomes a narrative doorway into history or philosophy.

At times, the book also recalls the humane curiosity of Freya Stark, who insisted that travel should enlarge sympathy rather than merely accumulate experiences. De Tours shares this instinct. His reflections on politics, religion, and culture are often impassioned, yet they remain grounded in an underlying faith in dialogue and humanity.

Humour and the Art of Digression

For all its lyricism, Bandoxa is not solemn. The author’s wit, sometimes gentle, sometimes sharply satirical, runs throughout the book.

There are comic passages about tsundoku (the art of buying books faster than one reads them), affectionate recollections of obscure rock bands, and surreal imagined interviews with rabbis and musicians. These moments of humour prevent the book from drifting too far into nostalgia; they keep it lively, unpredictable, and deeply human.

The structure reflects this spirit of digression. Chapters vary wildly in tone and length, from lyrical reveries to theatrical dialogues. The result resembles what the author himself calls a “memory salad”: an assortment of stories and reflections tossed together with deliberate disorder.

The Geography of a Life

Ultimately, Bandoxa is less about where the author travels than about how a life is shaped by places. Wales provides the emotional foundation; Spain offers sunlight and distance; Europe supplies the broader stage upon which history and politics unfold.

The book reminds us that travel writing, at its best, is not merely descriptive but reflective. As Paul Theroux once observed, “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” De Tours writes precisely from that retrospective vantage point, revisiting the landscapes that formed him and finding new meanings in their shadows.

A Book of Wandering

What lingers after the final page is not a neat narrative but a mood: reflective, wandering, tinged with Celtic melancholy yet warmed by humour and affection.

Bandoxa: A Celtic Journey may resist easy categorisation; it is memoir, travelogue, philosophical notebook, and cultural meditation all at once, but that resistance is part of its charm. Like the landscapes it describes, the book invites the reader not simply to observe but to linger, to listen, and perhaps to wander a little further than expected.

In an era of hurried travel and algorithmic itineraries, Martyn de Tours offers something rarer: the slow journey of a mind moving through memory, history, and place.

And as every great traveller knows, those are often the journeys that last the longest.

THE END

Bandoxa by Martyn de Tours: A Masterclass in Literary Exploration – Book Review

16 Mon Mar 2026

Posted by Martyn Jones in Inform, educate and entertain.

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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.