Why fiction is better than a guidebook

Armchair travellers know well the power of books; they have seen the whole world through their pages. Long before I set off along Route 66, I'd explored this ribbon of tar – stretching almost 4000 kilometres between Chicago and Santa Monica – while reading John Steinbeck's masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath. Decades later, dog-eared copy in hand, I set off on the pilgrimage it had inspired in me. That first reading had summoned me here; the second amplified a landscape already fully formed in my head.

When journeying to places still indistinct in my imagination, literature has proved an even more valuable accessory. Stories are superior to guide books in the elucidation of soul, spirit, national identity. They expand not only our geographical horizons, but our understanding of the things we cannot taste, smell or see. Too often, travel is an exercise in skimming the cream off a newly-conquered realm: the exotic food, the foreign quirks, the famous landmarks. We're a tabula rasa stamped with hastily collected impressions. Literature invites us to reject this fast fix, to dig down to the foundations undergirding everything we see on the surface.

I knew little of Naples before setting off with Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend tucked into my backpack. The book (along with the three others in the series) led me from the city's pizzeria and gelateria-crammed laneways on a journey deep into the Neapolitan psyche. The story was not an adjunct to my travels; in fact, it was my travels that complemented the book.

Literature has the ability to vest the physical journey with deep significance. Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn were my companions on the transpolar railway from St Petersburg to Salekhard; the tracks clattering beneath me had been laid by prisoners of Stalin's gulags. Both writers had been banished there too, during different periods of history and reading their accounts enhanced my comprehension – and capacity for empathy – far more intensely than any guide's explanation could do.

Writers are certainly the most dependable interpreters of their countrymen – and people, after all, are the progenitors of culture. My first impressions of the Republic of Congo were formed on the journey there, while reading Alain Mabanckou's Broken Glass. The rambunctious, subversive novel looped to its eventual conclusion without a single full stop. Forget Joseph Conrad's appraisal of the Congo in Heart of Darkness, Mabanckou seemed to be saying (had he spied my old copy of that novella in the seat pocket?). We are a self-aware, droll, multifaceted people, not an artefact waiting to be decoded by you.

Travel is often, by its nature, cosmetic, and books reinforce this fact compellingly. On Ghana's Cape Coast, Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing breathed life into the slaves once held in the castles I was visiting. But that's not where their story ends; it unfolds in a diasporic epic. To be sure, literature instills in us humility: our encounters are mere snapshots, for the real story extends farther than the eye could ever hope to see.