Reading: The Road to Oxiana
May. 14th, 2016 06:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartI bought my copy of Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana in the early 90s, after reading Bruce Chatwin's introduction to the 1981 Picador edition in the posthumous collection of his non-fiction, What Am I Doing Here?; I was slightly obsessed with Chatwin after I'd read The Songlines shortly after finishing my GCSE exams and found it a blinding revelation in terms of what could be done with form and structure and blending fact and fiction, so buying something he'd recommended was both an act of homage and an attempt to find something else that might be almost as wonderful to read. And then I never actually got round to reading it until now.
The book is the record of Byron's travels in Persia (as it was then) and Afghanistan in 1933 and 1934. It's in the form of his diary at the time, although doubtlessly edited significantly after the fact. His ostensible purpose was to study the origins of Islamic architecture, and Chatwin's introduction is full of praise for the detailed descriptions of buildings. I am not a huge fan of architecture, and while I appreciated that the descriptions were beautifully written they were the least interesting bits of the book for me (though being able to use Google image searches to see pictures of the buildings was helpful; hurrah for the twenty-first century!). I preferred the equally beautiful descriptions of the landscapes, though what I most enjoyed was reading about Byron's actual travels. He had a good sense of comedy, and his story of journeys disrupted by snow, floods and breakdowns and encounters with obstructive bureaucracy is very entertaining. It's also, rather like Between the Woods and the Water, fascinating as a view of a world that has been utterly changed by the march of history; the names of the places Byron visits are all too familiar from the news, especially once he enters Afghanistan, and his journey isn't one that it would be possible to make now. At one point he visits the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, although he is very uncomplimentary about them and I suspect he wouldn't have been too sorry about their destruction, unlike that of the Musalla in Herat (which was destroyed by the British in 1885).
I'm not an uncritical a fan as Chatwin was, but then again I'm reading Byron sixty years after he first did, and the book's faults are the faults of its age: the sheer breathtaking sense of privilege of a rich, white Englishman travelling in the Middle East and Central Asia of the 1930s, and the unthinking assumption of his superiority over the natives who drive him around, prepare his food and give up their houses for him to sleep in. But overall, I liked it, and I certainly feel as though I've learnt something about both architecture and the history of Iran and Afghanistan.
The book is the record of Byron's travels in Persia (as it was then) and Afghanistan in 1933 and 1934. It's in the form of his diary at the time, although doubtlessly edited significantly after the fact. His ostensible purpose was to study the origins of Islamic architecture, and Chatwin's introduction is full of praise for the detailed descriptions of buildings. I am not a huge fan of architecture, and while I appreciated that the descriptions were beautifully written they were the least interesting bits of the book for me (though being able to use Google image searches to see pictures of the buildings was helpful; hurrah for the twenty-first century!). I preferred the equally beautiful descriptions of the landscapes, though what I most enjoyed was reading about Byron's actual travels. He had a good sense of comedy, and his story of journeys disrupted by snow, floods and breakdowns and encounters with obstructive bureaucracy is very entertaining. It's also, rather like Between the Woods and the Water, fascinating as a view of a world that has been utterly changed by the march of history; the names of the places Byron visits are all too familiar from the news, especially once he enters Afghanistan, and his journey isn't one that it would be possible to make now. At one point he visits the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, although he is very uncomplimentary about them and I suspect he wouldn't have been too sorry about their destruction, unlike that of the Musalla in Herat (which was destroyed by the British in 1885).
I'm not an uncritical a fan as Chatwin was, but then again I'm reading Byron sixty years after he first did, and the book's faults are the faults of its age: the sheer breathtaking sense of privilege of a rich, white Englishman travelling in the Middle East and Central Asia of the 1930s, and the unthinking assumption of his superiority over the natives who drive him around, prepare his food and give up their houses for him to sleep in. But overall, I liked it, and I certainly feel as though I've learnt something about both architecture and the history of Iran and Afghanistan.
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Date: 2016-05-15 08:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-15 08:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-05-16 09:09 pm (UTC)I've never read any Chatwin, but it sounds like I should.
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Date: 2016-05-17 08:03 am (UTC)I'm a bit wary of re-reading Chatwin, in case he turns out to be dreadful now I'm not 16 any more, but he had a wonderful talent for description and I'd certainly recommend The Songlines and In Patagonia, as well as his collection of short writing What Am I Doing Here?. And On the Black Hill is very different but definitely worth reading. I didn't particularly get on with Utz or The Viceroy of Ouidah though I might like those better now. I can lend any you'd like to try, in any case. (I originally read him because when he died the pictures that accompanied the obituaries were so stunningly beautiful I wanted to know more about him, but I did love the writing as well.)