I picked up this book in Bothy Hostel in Arequipa, Peru. It was evidently self-published and there was and still is a whole shelf of copies of it to take for free, but it still seemed worth giving a go.

At first, I found the metaphors and similes very heavy-handed and awkward. I don't know whether they improved or Timblick simply wore me down with his personality, but I soon warmed to him and his style and had to find out what would happen to him and his associates. I took the book with me when trekking in the Colca Canyon. By the time I was making the agonizingly interminable ascent from Sangalle to Cabanaconde, I was hooked and took at least four half-hour breaks, during each of which I kept saying to myself "Just one more section" before finally carrying on.

I really enjoyed one of the main threads of the book, and one that could easily have utterly failed, namely his 'relationship' with the imagined spirit of Flora Tristan. He does a good job of maintaining both of their voices (and indeed differentiating the voices of everyone in the story is a strength of his). I had never heard of her before but now I am keen to look up her work and also the biography mentioned in the book.

Being interested not only in Timblick's story but in what happened to everyone else, I was a bit disappointed though with his lack of loyalty to others. This primarily applied to K.C. and Graham, both of whom he disparages continually despite their seeming to be his main friends and the kind of characters that I, also an ex-pat English teacher, would hang around with myself. However, at least his attitude to one of those is finally rehabilitated and there is retrospective justification for his low judgment of the other. On the other hand, he is very rude about the original Peruvian family kind enough to host him, more than their faults seem to deserve and, worse, he seems to heartlessly abandon his Arequipan surrogate family. I would really have liked him to give us an update on them from his 2010 visit.

A couple of aspects of his character would be much more objectionable but he manages to criticize himself amply on both fronts. One is his patently false claim to vegetarianism (when he was at best a pescatarian and soon goes even further downhill): vegetarianism is an invalid philosophy anyway since only veganism is a coherent position, so his drinking 'frog juice' &c. is morally indistinguishable from his previous stance. The second is his creepy/sleazy attitude towards women, but he repeatedly ridicules himself for this. His frankness is actually quite refreshing.

Timblick seems a little under-familiar with Spain and the rest of Latin America, since he assigns to Peru or Arequipa features that are extremely widespread in all Spanish-speaking countries, for example the unbelievably, exasperatingly slow pace at which people walk (which also applies to Brazil) and the irritatingly twee use of the '-(c)ito/-a' diminutive. He is also unnecessarily sneering towards Bolivia, which is in fact very similar to Peru: the people are simply more reserved, but so are us Britons so it's not really something he should object to too vehemently.

There are quite a lot of errors as a result of the self-publishing. It's natural for a few things to slip through without a professional proofreader, like a gerund/present participle in place of the bare form of the verb (I can't remember whether it should have been an infinitive or imperative), a couple of random numbers attached to words, misspelling Jim Carrey's surname and erratic formatting. However, all the double spaces should have been easily eliminated by a quick find-and-replace.

Some mistakes are particularly unacceptable for an English teacher. Since he repeatedly slates the use of American English, it's grating that he uses 'tsk' for 'tut', 'corn' for 'maize' (which is from the Spanish anyway), 'John Thomas' (twice) and especially both 'practicing' and 'practice' for 'practising' and 'practise', this latter when used by British English teachers being second in deplorability only to when they say "pronounciation". Worse by far than the Americanisms, though, is that he uses 'you're' for 'your'!

Subtler but still annoying is that he leaves out all opening question marks and accents in Spanish, but then bizarrely includes the accent in what he inexplicably phrases as 'coup de état'.

More seriously, though, and the main reason that I have had to knock a few points off, is that as well as using 'blacks' in place of 'black people' he twice uses 'poofter'. This is homophobic and completely unacceptable.

All in all, though, it is an engaging read and I have to recommend it, especially for British people in Peru and/or ex-pat ESOL teachers. I am now back in the same Arequipa hostel but since there are still twenty-three other copies available here I'll take mine to another city to release.

I gave it to a friend at Inglés Superior school of English.