The Picador Book of Journeys Edited by Robyn Davidson Picador, 477pp, £16 ISBN 0330368621

I have an embarrassing confession to make, which should probably disqualify me from being allowed anywhere near the volume under review. But I have a lack of interest to declare, so here goes: I have never for the life of me been able to see the point of anthologies such as this. Apart from offering publishers a rare opportunity to shoehorn their own name into the title - The Picador Book of Travel, The Faber Book of Faber Books, and so on - it is hard to see what purpose they serve. A student might find them full of handy short cuts to longer works; and they work as gifts, on the basis that Grandpa must be able to find something in there that he likes. But an ordinary reader is almost bound to be unnerved by the deflating sequence of jumpy beginnings and abrupt endings. This Picador collection, for instance, embraces thousands of years of human life and strays into every continent. A horrifying truth emerges: everywhere sounds much like everywhere else. There is something in the idiom of descriptive writing - a lone consciousness surveying the mysterious outer world and its own privations - that flattens the view. However good (and most of it is observant, reflective and shrewd), there is a near-fatal lack of the romance that might come from a close encounter, rather than merely a passing one. Rebecca West sums it up well when she visits Croatia and gazes at the people. "They are all different," she writes, "and they are all the same." I know now what she meant.

It is pretty much routine, with anthologies, to harangue the editor for the eccentric short-sightedness of his or her choice. Robyn Davidson certainly invites such criticism here by omitting an almost insulting number of the usual suspects. Not many editors would have included nothing at all by such luminaries as Jan Morris, Lawrence Durrell, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Freya Stark, Robert Byron, Redmond O'Hanlon, Edward Hoagland or Saul Bellow. (Hey, hang on a minute. Memo to Picador - how about volume two?) But anyone can play this game; we all have our favourites. And Davidson has given herself, or been handed, so vast an archive - any writing involving a journey from A to B, from any time - that any one selection is bound to strike some people as reductive and riddled with gaps.

In any case, she has fashionably set her face against the idea of travel writers being foreign correspondents for the capitalist west, visiting the world's faraway places and telling us what they are like. Someone once defined travel writing as "an Old Etonian on a bicycle in Stavanger", and it is refreshing to see someone giving priority to more urgent trips. Davidson seems to view travel as a form of suffering, an ennobling expiation, so you search in vain for a joke. But the book is at its best when at its grumpiest, in the notes of a Napoleonic soldier narrating the march through Russia; Kafka's jottings in Sweden; an amazing dramatisation of thirst in the Australian outback by the stranded explorer Ernest Giles; a gripping escape by Esteban Montejo, a runaway slave in Cuba; and Apsley Cherry-Garrard's famous but still riveting account of his sweat-freezing slog through the Antarctic.

These are true highlights, and there are others (Derek Walcott's Nobel-speech tribute to the Caribbean, Mary McCarthy in Vietnam, or Joan Didion on El Salvador, wittily parodying Michelin-style travel guides by suggesting that the body dumps are "worth the detour"). But there are quite a few lowlights, too. Margaret Fontaine is so pedestrian on butterflies that it makes us ache for Nabokov. Pier Paolo Pasolini labours through the easiest cliche in the world, the "horrendous poverty" to be found in India. And while it might be possible to choose four pieces that tell you less about England than the ones chosen here - by Samuel Butler, Heinrich Heine, Edmund Wilson and S D Mahomed - it would be a challenge. This might be because none of the pieces is contemporary, and travelogues are too utilitarian to age gracefully. It is one thing, as a reader, to be told what a place is like, quite another to be told what it was like. In her panicky desire to have nothing to do with anything so plebeian as tourism, Davidson has excluded anything that might actually spark our interest in shaking the dust off our feet. This is travel writing designed to make you glad you stayed at home, to make you think of getting double glazing.

In the end, however, the besetting problem is the chopping and changing. One minute we're loading sleds with the Eskimos, the next we're in Harlem. Just when we're filling the hot-water bottle to recover from Cherry-Garrard's ice-bound yomp, we find ourselves discovering New Zealand with Captain Cook. Suddenly we are tossed into a couple of pages from one of Joseph Conrad's least interesting novels, The Mirror of the Sea, pointing out how awful it must be to capsize and drown. I am sure this is true, but a minute before I was with Elizabeth Bishop in the Brazilian jungle, taking snake fat for sore legs. The contrasts were just too lurching. I grew dizzy; the book fell from my hands; and I did not rush to pick it up.

I have no argument with anthologies of complete works - books of short stories, say. But The Picador Book of Journeys is an ecologically unsound menagerie of extracts ripped from their natural habitats. Some are by classic authors - Stendhal, Thackeray, Proust, Conrad, Hemingway, Auden, Naipaul, Lessing; others are by relative unknowns - Gontran de Poncins, Jakob Walter, Ernest Giles and Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche. Some are brilliant; some are not. None of them benefits from having been included. The anthologising tendency slices through most of the things that make an individual book worth reading - narrative energy, character, rhetoric or "voice" - and substitutes for these a nervous faith in variegated brevity. It resembles those budget collections of classical gems, with mimsy or overeager titles like "These We Have Loved" or "The 100 Best Choruses in the World, Ever!".

Perhaps, in the end, it is the definite article in the title that really grates. All anthologies are provisional. This one should be called "a" book of journeys or, more accurately, "A Book of Travel-Style Bits and Bobs by the Best People We Could Think of at the Time, With Enough Famous Names to Guarantee Bookshop Space". That said, I shall certainly be hanging on to it. At home, we sometimes jam two tables together to make a space large enough for more than the usual number of people. So we always need four books of equal width as a temporary furniture jack. On the principle that books do furnish a room, this one looks a perfect fit. It will be fun, when friends' children lean over to reach the sausage rolls or the chocolate buttons, to think that they are bracing themselves on such grand, if abbreviated, adventures.

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