Patagonia: A Cultural History by Chris Moss
Signal Books, £12.99

THE most memorable experience I’ve had in any cinema came in Patagonia. I was travelling on my own in a foreign city and was delighted to see that the famous Argentine film La Patagonia Rebelde, Héctor Olivera’s 1974 adaptation of Osvaldo Bayer’s book about anarchist trade unionists in the region in the 1920s, was on. A very cheap ticket gave me an unsurpassed two hours of enjoyment and, as one does on such an occasion, I staggered out oblivious of everything and wondering, vaguely, where I was. As I pushed out of the swing doors I remembered, rather to my surprise at that moment, that I was in the oil town of Comodoro Rivadavia in Patagonia. A plane was to take me the following day to the Falkland Islands and, given the paucity of activities in that bleak and windy town, there was little else to do than go to the casino which the government in Buenos Aires allowed in a bid to make the place a bit more attractive to oil men and other visitors. I don’t remember whether I won money or lost but, with the film and the roulette, it was an altogether exceptional evening in Patagonia.

But then in my experience Patagonia, bleak and windy as it is, is always full of surprises. Chris Moss, who has worked as a journalist in Argentina and who knows its regions well, has brought out an elegant and sympathetic intellectual guide to Patagonia which points up some of these surprises.

There are the Welsh around Gaiman and Trelew, still grabbing on to their Celtic roots and language enough to be able to figure from time to time in the Eisteddfod. There is Ushuaia, the city at the end of the earth, much mocked by those who see it as a Patagonian Disneyland but which I remember as the place where a few of us saw the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano sail off down the Beagle Channel on her last patrol to her watery death during the Falklands War.

The aboriginal peoples about whom the first European explorers wove their most fantastical tales appeared to live the miserable nomadic lives of vagrants existing in rude huts, leaving almost no monuments behind except one or two of exceptional beauty and craft. Yet, like the Eskimos at the other end of the planet, they were masters of language. Moss tells us, for example, that the verb mamihlapinatapai used by the Yahgan people means “to look at each other, hoping that either will offer to do something, which both parties desire but are unwilling to do”. After they had been in Patagonia for 13,000 years – their ancestors arrived from Asia via what is now Siberia and Alaska – the Argentine army arrived in the mid-19th century and did their best to ethnically cleanse them in favour of Buenos Aires fat cats who were given ranches of thousands and thousands of hectares.

Some readers will find it difficult to read any more about the region after being subjected to the work of Bruce Chatwin; In Patagonia was a brief success on its first publication. Happily, however, the canny Moss, who himself is a stylish writer, is not to be taken in. He calls the work perfect for an “exercise in self-promotion and reinvention” and his own book is the antidote for anyone succumbing to a bout of Chatwinismo and the ennui it produces.

Patagonia shows the publisher has a gift for producing a handsome book, well laid out and printed on fine paper in India. Signal and the author should make a bomb with it as we come up towards Christmas. They certainly deserve to.

Hugh O’Shaughnessy