Reading: The Broken Road
Dec. 11th, 2016 11:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartI didn't read Patrick Leigh Fermor in 1990, when I had discovered travel writing via Bruce Chatwin and The Songlines* and someone (I think it was my A-Level English teacher) had recommended him, because when I looked for his books in the local bookshop I saw that the third volume of the trilogy had yet to be published, and thought I'd wait until I could read all three (at that point, Between the Woods and the Water was recent enough that this didn't seem like too remote a possibility). I finally bought a copy of A Time of Gifts in 2011, when the news of Leigh Fermor's death suggested that, in fact, this was not going to happen, and I might as well just read the two instalments he had managed to publish. However, despite the writer's block which prevented the final book appearing during his lifetime, an early manuscript (actually predating the writing of A Time of Gifts) still existed; in the last years of his life, he began revising this, and after his death the travel writer Colin Thubron and Leigh Fermor's biographer Artemis Cooper prepared the manuscript for publication.
The Broken Road isn't a complete, polished work like the earlier two; the main narrative breaks off in the Bulgarian port of Burgas, still a long way from the walk's final destination, and is followed only by some scrappy diary entries from PLF's stay in Constantinople and a section of longer entries describing his subsequent visit to Mount Athos. The descriptions of the landscapes, towns and people of Bulgaria and Romania are as stunningly beautiful as those of the earlier books, and if The Broken Road does sometimes feel like the less mature work that it is in origin that's not a reflection on the writing; rather, it's the more personal content, with the long historical and geographical digressions of the earlier books mainly absent and replaced by reflections on the process of writing an account of a journey undertaken thirty years previously and the childhood events that had brought him to the point of setting out on the walk. There's more of a sense of occasional homesickness for London here, and also a much clearer impression of the way this charming and good-looking young man was taken up and fêted, not just by the aristocracy across Europe but specifically by the women he met; a Greek-Bulgarian student in Plodiv, the landlady of a hotel in Rustchuck, the whole staff of the brothel he mistakes for a hotel in Bucharest... There's also more melancholy in the reflections of the fates of the people Leigh Fermor met on his journey during the intervening years, especially those in Bucharest (where he is careful only to mention by name the people who are dead or who had escaped to the West by the time of writing, to avoid anything that might put his friends in danger at the hands of the Communist authorities); I don't know whether this is because of self-editing in the first two publisheed books, or because Romania was the place where Leigh Fermor ended up living for several years between the end of his walk and the start of World War 2, and the losses have hit him more because of that.
I found the diary entries from Mount Athos the weakest part of the book. I can see why the editors included them, as they do offer a more satisfactory conclusion than breaking off mid-sentence in Burgas, but PLF at nineteen is a very different person from PLF in his fifties looking back; he already had the facility for description that is the defining feature of the work of his later self, but he's (understandably) much less mature and his descriptions of the people he meets lack the subtlety and insight of the later work. His dislike for the food offered in many of the monasteries (vegetables and olive oil, horror of horrors!) comes across as somewhat brattish, and his discomfort at encountering a monk who insists on holding his hand is an interesting contrast to his more open-minded reflections, earlier in the book and later in his life, on homosexual relations among the people who gave the English language the word "bugger".
It is a glorious book, though, and I'm glad that we did get a third volume in the end, even if not quite a complete one.
*It may be 25 years, but I still got full marks on the set of bonus questions on Chatwin on this week's University Challenge, which was more than the students did.
The Broken Road isn't a complete, polished work like the earlier two; the main narrative breaks off in the Bulgarian port of Burgas, still a long way from the walk's final destination, and is followed only by some scrappy diary entries from PLF's stay in Constantinople and a section of longer entries describing his subsequent visit to Mount Athos. The descriptions of the landscapes, towns and people of Bulgaria and Romania are as stunningly beautiful as those of the earlier books, and if The Broken Road does sometimes feel like the less mature work that it is in origin that's not a reflection on the writing; rather, it's the more personal content, with the long historical and geographical digressions of the earlier books mainly absent and replaced by reflections on the process of writing an account of a journey undertaken thirty years previously and the childhood events that had brought him to the point of setting out on the walk. There's more of a sense of occasional homesickness for London here, and also a much clearer impression of the way this charming and good-looking young man was taken up and fêted, not just by the aristocracy across Europe but specifically by the women he met; a Greek-Bulgarian student in Plodiv, the landlady of a hotel in Rustchuck, the whole staff of the brothel he mistakes for a hotel in Bucharest... There's also more melancholy in the reflections of the fates of the people Leigh Fermor met on his journey during the intervening years, especially those in Bucharest (where he is careful only to mention by name the people who are dead or who had escaped to the West by the time of writing, to avoid anything that might put his friends in danger at the hands of the Communist authorities); I don't know whether this is because of self-editing in the first two publisheed books, or because Romania was the place where Leigh Fermor ended up living for several years between the end of his walk and the start of World War 2, and the losses have hit him more because of that.
I found the diary entries from Mount Athos the weakest part of the book. I can see why the editors included them, as they do offer a more satisfactory conclusion than breaking off mid-sentence in Burgas, but PLF at nineteen is a very different person from PLF in his fifties looking back; he already had the facility for description that is the defining feature of the work of his later self, but he's (understandably) much less mature and his descriptions of the people he meets lack the subtlety and insight of the later work. His dislike for the food offered in many of the monasteries (vegetables and olive oil, horror of horrors!) comes across as somewhat brattish, and his discomfort at encountering a monk who insists on holding his hand is an interesting contrast to his more open-minded reflections, earlier in the book and later in his life, on homosexual relations among the people who gave the English language the word "bugger".
It is a glorious book, though, and I'm glad that we did get a third volume in the end, even if not quite a complete one.
*It may be 25 years, but I still got full marks on the set of bonus questions on Chatwin on this week's University Challenge, which was more than the students did.
