Clara’s Verdict
There are travel writers, and then there is Michael Palin. His particular gift – honed across decades of Python-era television and sharpened through years of globe-trotting – is the ability to be genuinely curious about every person he meets without ever tipping into sentimentality or condescension. Full Circle, the account of his circumnavigation of the Pacific Rim, is arguably the most ambitious and most rewarding of his travel books. The journey is extraordinary; the company, as ever, is excellent.
What makes this audiobook exceptional is that Palin reads it himself, and Michael Palin reading Michael Palin is one of the great pleasures of the audio form. His timing, his warmth, his capacity for self-deprecating understatement – all of it translates perfectly. Eleven hours and fifty minutes in his company is not nearly enough, and you will be reaching for the next book in the series before the final chapter has quite finished.
About the Audiobook
The Pacific Rim journey took almost a year: eighteen countries, the world’s largest ocean, and an itinerary that required Palin to cross glaciers, climb recently erupted volcanoes, eat maggots in Mexico, and hold polite conversations with head-hunters in Borneo. He follows the great rivers – the Yangtze, the Amazon – to places so remote they barely appear on tourist maps. Along the way, he visits communities that would be transformed beyond recognition within a generation.
The most affecting passages concern the Chinese villages now submerged beneath the Three Gorges Dam reservoir – communities Palin visited in their final years, their ancient streets and temples visible for the last time before the waters rose. To listen to these sections now, knowing what came after, gives the book an elegiac quality entirely absent from the television series. The written account captures what the camera cannot: the texture of daily life in transition, observed with patient attention by someone who genuinely cares about what he sees.
The book is simultaneously a travel memoir and an inadvertent historical document. To read it now is to encounter a world in the middle of transformation, observed with a particular kind of gentle, attentive intelligence. Palin is funny and informative without being heavy-handed; he allows people and places to speak for themselves while providing just enough context to make them comprehensible to a reader arriving cold.
The Narration
Michael Palin narrates his own work, and this is, without question, the correct decision. His voice is warm, unhurried, and effortlessly engaging – a voice that has been making people feel at home since the early 1970s. He brings the same lightness of touch to a difficult border crossing as he does to a description of a particularly good noodle soup, which is exactly the tonal balance the material requires. At nearly twelve hours, this is a long listen, but it never feels like a slog. You are simply in excellent company for an extended period, which is among the finest things an audiobook can offer. The recording quality, from Audible Studios, is clean and professional throughout.
What Readers Say
The audiobook holds a 4.6-star rating from 466 listeners – a strong and consistent score for a long-form travel memoir. Reviewers repeatedly comment on Palin’s writing style: humorous, informative, never heavy-handed. Several note the emotional weight that comes from visiting places that no longer exist in the form Palin describes – the Three Gorges villages being the most frequently cited example. One listener described it as the work of “a modern-day Ulysses,” adding that Palin “observes so much variety of the earth’s surface and the cultures of its human inhabitants.” Another who brought the book to Ireland for a separate trip found that reading it there made the journey significantly richer. Both assessments capture what Palin does better than almost anyone else working in the form.
Who Should Listen?
One aspect of the book that does not quite come through in the television series is the sheer physical and logistical difficulty of the journey. Palin is careful to acknowledge the crew around him – the producers, directors, and support staff who make the whole enterprise possible – and in doing so he provides a genuinely illuminating account of what it costs, in time and discomfort and distance from home, to travel as thoroughly as he does. The result is a book that is simultaneously aspirational and grounding: you want to go to these places, and you are also grateful that someone else has done the hard work of getting there first.
Travel memoir enthusiasts and Palin devotees are the obvious audience, but this book rewards anyone who enjoys intelligent, humorous non-fiction with genuine historical content. If you have ever watched any of Palin’s BBC travel series – Around the World in Eighty Days, Pole to Pole, Sahara – you will find the audio version of Full Circle a natural and very satisfying extension of that pleasure. It is also an excellent recommendation for those who enjoy narrative history and want to understand how the Pacific world has changed over the past thirty years. Available on Audible UK, Kobo, Scribd, and Storytel.
Listen to Full Circle on Audible UK – nearly twelve hours in the finest possible company.
