The ways of tourism departments are often difficult to fathom, but their choices of promotional literature are always placid and anodyne. A gumshoe traveller would be well served, therefore, to look to a few seamier books to get a handle on a city. Life happens outside the picture postcard, he will learn, and he will go his way the wiser for it.
Not everybody in Venice is a beetle-browed gondolier-singing ‘Nessun Dorma’, he would realise, for instance, upon reading John Berendt’s The City of Falling Angels. Some are potential arsonists, some are antiquated bureaucrats, some are unscrupulous expatriates, and many are gossiping backstabbers. A couple are shockingly, even bores. Bores in Venice? How can that possibly be? Haven’t they been outlawed already?
Chuck Palahniuk, on the other hand, seems to have almost created his very own Portland, Oregon in Fugitives & Refugees. It includes a self-cleaning house, a session of groping in the Shanghai tunnels, naked mannequins, the I-tit-a-rod Race, the Santa Rampage, and Palahniuk’s tonsils—none of which, you may be assured, features on the first page of the gushing ‘Visit Portland’ brochures.
Only one city, I imagine, would pass itself off as portrayed in literature, specifically in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Vegas’ tourism officials may not actually press blotter acid, mescaline and amyls upon wide-eyed visitors, but the city revels in its reputation for iniquity. And why not? It is, after all, iniquity that its tourists seek.