Flashbacks from the Flow Zone (Tom Crago, Hardie Grant)

Tom Crago’s Flashbacks from the Flow Zone is ostensibly a memoir about work and travel in the just-connecting days of the early millennium. Global business and pleasure mix in heady moments of decadence and bizarreness. The idea is Bright Lights, Big City meets Up in the Air, and some characteristics of both are present in this book: Crago barely lets a page pass without citing some memorable night out or strange experience unique to the latest far-flung country he’s visited. But the absence of any discernible narrative thread or idea makes Flashbacks from the Flow Zone a scattershot, disjointed and curiously flat read. Crago’s writing is confident and clear, but it is too often studded with banal generalities, lazy aphorisms and anecdotes of bar-trotting that are neither evocative nor interesting. His eye is astute and often thoughtful, but unanchored and unsatisfying. Pitching for an audience that grew up in the last decade and who might remember it fondly, Crago’s memoir is, like the travels recounted, unfortunately all over the place.

Patrick Mullins is an editor and writer

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Category: Reviews