Review: The Sojourners by T. L. Hughes

Mike Hogan lands in London with two friends looking for work but instead follows his heart across Europe on a soul-opening adventure in The Sojourners by T. L. Hughes. There’s drinking and late night philosophy in pubs, a meditative surfer in Germany, and love in Greece and Turkey, while Mike ruminates on the people and places glimpsed from trains, buses and mopeds, letting readers accompany him on this poetic travelogue.

The novel begins with twenty-something Mike and friends Luke and Decky completing a road trip from California to the East Coast, boarding a plane and landing in London looking for jobs in video production. They soon abandon their ill-conceived plans and trade them in for wanderlust, ferrying to Amsterdam, where Mike takes a bad mushroom trip. In Germany, Mike visits Dachau, where he ponders good and evil and the resiliency of life.

Mike is effectively painted as an innocent abroad – pensive and thoughtful, but open-eyed to the new people and places populating his journey. Like all travelogues, fact of fiction, the point is never the destination but the journey. Hughes first gives the reader a Mike in a hurry to find a job – to get to the point without enjoying the scenes around him. But by watching his friends, meeting a helpful taxi driver and slowly taking in the cities around him, Mike starts to appreciate the moment.

Set in the 1980s, the novel underscores the unpopularity of America in Europe during the Reagan Administration. Hughes does a great job of letting Mike and friends discover the love/hate relationship Europe has with the United States. Hughes offers up communists and atheists across the continent, and Mike and company talk politics and religion into the night, drinks in hand, learning that the world is a wide and varied place.

Hughes gives us beautiful sentences and finely crafted imagery throughout, with a comforting cadence in his prose, rolling along like a train journey. The story offers carefree country-hopping for the armchair traveler, and each new location – bar, disco, train car, or sidewalk – serves up a vicarious thrill. Young people, their troubles either stuffed down or non-existent, seize the moment. Mike slowly lets go of his worries as he meets and observes a variety of people across Europe, and his perspective is both inspiring and calming.

Occasionally, Mike comes off as one-dimensional – the stereotypical traveler-seeker – who occasionally seems overly earnest, or even self-congratulatory. At times his observations are enough to propel the story along. However, over the course of the novel, the wonderfully evocative prose is not always matched by the same depth of characterization. That said, Hughes’ prose shines most of all as he paints imaginative, provocative pictures. As this is a book where landscape is as much a character as the people in the story, the book does make up for any weakness in the protagonist.

Overall, The Sojourners is a beautifully written work of travel writing, which will be especially appealing to those who have yet to travel, or those who may want to rekindle the expanded horizons of traveling abroad.