Bandit Roads: Into The Lawless Heart Of Mexico;
By Richard Grant; Hachette India;
Pages: 285; Price: Rs: 595
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Bandit Roads reads like a thriller and has one racing to get to the end. The opening line says, ‘So this is what it feels like to be hunted.’ Richard Grant tells a chilling account of being chased by men who kill ‘to please the trigger finger’. In the dead of night, in the forest of the Sierra Madre mountain range of north Mexico, Grant must snarl to keep animals he cannot see at bay. Such are the survival skills his journey demands.
The story begins with Grant admitting to an ‘unfortunate fascination’ with the 900-mile Sierra Madre, one of the most forbidding and mysterious mountain ranges of the world. For the last 30 years, this has been one of the world’s largest production areas of heroin, marijuana and opium. Historically, an area left unexploited by the ancient Aztecs, the Spanish colonizers, and even the present government. Better known as the badlands of drug lords and bandits where murder rate in some areas is eight times higher than most homicidal US cities.
Grant’s ‘bright idea’ is to travel the stretch and write a book about it. Not many have done this before; his own research finds accounts by three travelers. ‘You’ll never make it alive,’ he is told by well-meaning friends but that does not deter him.
A British journalist who moved to the US in 1987 while in his mid-20s, saying ‘I’d rather wash dishes in the States than be a journalist in London’, Grant is a compulsive traveller. For 15 years he covered crime and the American underbelly as a freelance magazine journalist travelling across the country. His first book won him a prestigious travel- writing award. Bandit Roads is his second book.
Grant writes like a journalist retelling his adventures and misadventures with a self- depreciating quality and good humour. ‘If I had half a goddamn brain I wouldn’t have been here in the first place’; ‘If I can’t handle this, it was time to get a straight job’, he writes. On his way, he drinks and snorts with bandits and narcotic lords; folk healers recommend him eggs of ‘married hens’; he goes treasure hunting looking for an outlaw’s buried hidden treasure, noting what gold does to people’s souls.
There are some interesting facts: If the drug business was somehow wiped out, Mexico’s economy would shrink by 63 per cent; Illegal narcotics is the third-biggest industry in the world after arms and oil.
Pico Iyer once said that perhaps travel writers at one time wrote for a reader who could never hope to be in that place; but, with cameras now going everywhere, the writer must look between the cracks to discover things the camera cannot see. Grant takes us into a world little is known about – unlikely we will see it for ourselves; he also sees within the cracks and shows us what only a good writer can: Impressions, observations, analysis, the emotional roller-coaster.
Bandit Roads is a brave journey by all accounts, and powerfully told. The kind that makes you say, ‘Teach me half the recklessness that your heart must know...’ Travel writing at its best.
A version of this review was published in the Businessworld Issue Dated 02-08 May 2009
Book Reviews 
Bandit Roads: Into The Lawless Heart Of Mexico;
