Peter Fleming was widely regarded by contemporaries in the 1930s as the archetypal adventurer and travel writer, a reputation based on three travel books published during that decade: Brazilian Adventure (1933), One's Company (1934), and News From Tartary (1936). Though he was well known for intrepidity, his travel writing is characterized by an antiheroic debunking. Though his witty and modest strategies did not diminish his renown as an adventurer, his main contribution to the travel-writing tradition is the invention of a modest response to strangeness, acknowledging that he and his readers inhabit a world they assume to be normal but may not be. His narrative persona is surprised by nothing and invokes norms that are sometimes comic, sometimes quietly heroic, and sometimes quirky. Paul Fussell in Abroad--British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (1980) characterizes Fleming's antiheroism as representing a significant tendency in travel writing after World War I.

In their Journey to...