Mortimer of the Maghreb

Known primarily for his travel writing and poetry (In Dr. No's Garden), Shukman offers a skillfully crafted, eclectic collection of a novella and three stories tracking the rueful meandering of an aging British journalist and other hapless travelers. The first half of the book, a three-part novella, follows Charles Mortimerhas, who has enjoyed a terrific career as a far-flung journalist. At age 56, though, he finds himself back in the desert covering a dubious civil war on the Moroccan border. Bitterly encamped with an insurgency, he fills his notebook with self-pitying reflections, addressed to his ex-wife, Saskia, and staggers in a ""daze of remorse"" pining for French photographer Celeste, a former lover with whom he shared his finest moments. Shukman's other characters are similarly beat up by peripatetic lives: Harry Burton, the privileged solitary British traveler of ""Castaway,"" stuck on the Bahamian island of Inagua, is ""a global man, highly trained"" and without attachment. Jim Rogers, the rich securities banker of ""Darien Dogs,"" is ""a modern-day hunter-gatherer,"" who arrives in Panama to secure the construction of a new oil pipeline, and gradually succumbs to the snares of a fetching local prostitute. They make for a sad bunch indeed, but in ""Old Providence,"" feted British painter Rothman Case, awash in drink by middle age, recognizes that the moment of bottoming out also affords him his first glimpse of artistic freedom.