Of course, in choosing Greece as his subject, the question facing any potential reader is, Will the author be able to get behind the swathes of tourist gloss to find the authentic Greece?  I am pleased to say that while Harry does not try to make out that his travels were wholly in isolated villages or mountain paths, on the whole, he does manage to present a picture of a land where the old ways still run in parallel with the coastal strips and tourist destinations.

Harry’s aim was simple – “a dream of a journey through the scattered islands of the Ionian and the Aegean spanning centuries of exotic history and all the time travelling on a hotchpotch assortment of ships trailing the azure seas”.  He states at the start of his book that no-one knows how may islands go to make up the Greek Archipelago – perhaps 1000 to 6000 (it all depends on the size of rock to be counted as an “island”!).  In the end Harry classified the islands into seven groups – The Ionian, The Dodecanse, The Cyclades, The Argo-Saronic, The Sporades, The North Eastern Aegean Islands, and Crete.

Perhaps more than most Mediterranean nations, Greece presents an incredibly layered history, with the ancient cults of Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon etc overlain with centuries of Orthodox Christianity – a powerful force even to this day with many monasteries and devotional centres scattered throughout the islands, most notably of course on Mount Athos.  Harry is informative enough about the ancient Greek religions without baffling his readers with their mind-numbing intricacies.

Holy Trinity Monastery, Meteora, Greece

He is at his best when describing the Christian history of the island, perhaps because of the living faith exhibited by worshippers as they bow before icons and kneel in dingy but atmospheric churches.  He managed to get an audience with an Abbot, a peculiarly stressed individual with a desk drowning in papers and visibly struggling with his daily “audience in the round”.  On Mount Athos his guest room was a bare cell, with only flea-ridden blankets available to help him through the bitter cold.  But the spirituality of the Greek monks is vast and of course the privations of the life are all part of the calling.

In contrast to the aesthetic life of the monks, Harry encountered the usual demented crowds of drunken English revelers at the dreaded resort of Faliraki – in true travel-writing fashion, forcing himself to enter the Forty-Eight Hour Bar to talk with the nineteen year olds who seemed to be suitably out of their heads.  The Greeks however know where their income comes from and tolerate the excesses of the young Brits, knowing that when they return to England, the euros they have spent in Greece will tide many families over the winter.

Harry can be quite intrepid at times and doesn’t shirk the more difficult terrain, having one nasty cliff fall which left him recovering for a couple of days. The most striking expedition to me was his accompanied swim around a headland on Antikythira and deep into a cave system -

We swam under a granite arch that would be the envy of any Roman architect – we became inconsequential beings in its shadow, our every word echoing off the sides of the natural nave as Paddy indicated a small darkened triangle at the rear of the gaping entrance, intermittently obscured by the rist and fall of the sea . . . feeling our way with our hands along the polished ceiling, we dived in under the water until mercifully, up we came into an inner chamber, icy cold and black like oil, the sea beating the walls  with thick syrupy thwacks.

Myrtos Beach, Cephallonia

In other islands Harry is keen to discover literary roots – not least Lawrence Durrell in Rhodes, where Harry discovers the villa in which he wrote Reflections on a Marine Venus, now sadly empty with an overgrown garden.  I confess to some disappointment that when visiting Cephallonia, Harry does not mention Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – surely one of the most evocative Greek-based novels of our time.

The book is beautifully produced with a beautifully designed cover, very useful maps throughout and some lovely quotations beneath the chapter headings.   I can’t help but wonder how different the book would be  if Harry did the same journey in 2011 with its street protests, the climate of austerity and the decline in tourist euros?

What is the purpose of travel-writing?  I think its to do with carrying the reader along to obscure places or on means of transport which he or she wouldn’t normally use, in order to give a mind-picture of the places visited.  Travel-writing can inspire you to visit places or even sometimes put you off.  At its best, it can be a sort of substitute for making the journey yourself.  I think Harry’s book fulfils all the goals of good travel writing, leaving me with images of a warm, colourful country with masses of history and culture.  I recommend it for its content, its production values and mostly for the quality of the writing.

The Sussex Ouse is a short river (less than fifty miles from its rising to the sea), and it flows through a rich countryside of woods and fields before flowing down between a gap in the range of hills known as the South Downs, until it reaches the port of Newhaven.  I live in this area and walk bits of her route regularly and would say that it is on the whole a cosy landscape, containing a few pretty villages and the ancient market town of Lewes.  Although it may lack drama, the route is steeped in history and this has given Olivia Laing a considerable amount of material to enrich the account of her walk which took place over the course of seven days in September, a couple of years ago.  I could not help but be impressed by the huge list of sources at the back of her book which takes up eight pages of small print – although the walk may be short, Olivia Laing’s readers won’t be lacking information about it.

We learn about the authors personal crisis early in the book

In the spring of 2009 I became caught up in one of those crises that periodically afflict a life, when the scaffolding that maintains us seems destined to collapse. I lost a job by accident, and then through sheer carelessness, I lost the man  I loved.

Olivia “lost the knack of sleeping” and at periodical intervals throughout the day she felt that she was drowning. The idea came to her clear out her life by walking the length of the River Ouse and while reading the account of her journey, we keep coming back to that underlying sadness in little asides and remarks indicating that the clearing out was a tough job to do.

The walk commences in an area of thickets, small woods and muddy fields bounded with barbed wire fences – maybe a place fitting for Olivia’s current state of mind.  However, we are soon treated to some descriptive nature writing,

The first pipistrelles were crossing Coos Lane as I reached the water.  It was just after sunset and everything had stilled, the sky shot faintly with rose.  The reflections in the lake seemed sunk very deep.  The water pleated as the carp sank and climbed, occasionally breaking the surface to shivers.  Beneath them, the slow clouds made their way east.  At the far side of the lake the trees were reflected in sooty green and when the fish jumped there the ripples ran in white concentric circles.

Olivia launches into many passages like this and they capture the quiet stillness of much of the route, which is only disturbed by the noise of passing cars from the roads which are never too far away.  As ex-Deputy Books Editor of the Observer newspaper, Olivia Laing’s book is full of literary references.  Sometimes these seem slightly overlong (ten pages of Kenneth Grahame of Wind in the Willows fame for example) and I found myself skipping through some of these, but also realised that they are well written and do relate to the landscape she walks through.

The writing is of a style that will be bound to gain Olivia an invitation to next year’s Charleston Festival.  Apart from the considerable amount of material on Virginia and Leonard Woolf, she herself often moves into exploring the numinous aspects of her walk,

We navigate by omens such as these.  You don’t have to be a poet to be prone to apophenia, to seeking meaningful patterns in the scattered, senseless data of the everyday life.  In a certain mood, the earth itself can seem a ouija board, calling out its advice, discharging symbol after symbol, relentless and malevolent, though to ordinary eyes nothing more has happened than a single black and white bird winging down the sky.

You have to like this sort of digression to really enjoy this book for there is quite a lot of it.  I don’t mean to sound churlish, but the synergy with the whole Woolf thing is sometimes a little too laboured and as one who does not take over-much to it all, I found it a bit of a struggle not to giggle at times.  My male brain tends to see a walk as a walk, and perhaps an opportunity for some self-reflection, rather than a journey through a symbolic landscape.

Having said that, the history side of the book is excellent – Olivia Laing provides a lovely potted history of the Piltdown Man archaeological scam, a blow by blow account of the little known Battle of Lewes and a fascinating chapter on the terrible floods that came on Lewes in 2000.  It would not be fair on  the author to commend this book only for its excellent local history (which should make it an essential purchase for anyone who lives in East Sussex), when in reality this is a highly literary walking journal which adds another volume to the burgeoning Woolf-related library.

I feel sorry for making some slightly disparaging remarks about the tone of the book for it really is a very good production all round. Many people will love it and its quality is without doubt.  However when I look on my recent reviews I couldn’t help but compare this book with the travel journal of another woman writer – Susie Kelly who in her book, The Valley of Heaven and Hell managed to combine huge amounts of history with without the same high-mindedness of some of Olivia Laing’s writing.   I’ll probably give this one a five star review on Amazon, because this book does contribute a great deal to the literature of the area in which I live and despite my hesitations about its tone, its quality is beyond doubt.

For after the Second World War, the lands of East Prussia were parcelled out between Russia and Poland.  Those of the German population who could, fled westwards in the face of the retributive zeal of the advancing Russian troops.  Many others were recruited as forced labour by the Russians and found themselves in the Gulag system.  Towns and cities were renamed, gravestones were used as paving stones and so far as was possible, all traces of German residency were obliterated. The excellent Wikipedia article on East Prussia records that “a population which had stood at 2.2 million in 1940 was reduced to 193,000 at the end of May 1945″.

It is difficult for those who live on an island to understand what it is like to live in an area with fluid borders where skirmishes with neighbouring countries redraw the shape of your nation several times each century.  The reshaping and re-ordering of East Prussia however far exceeds that of anywhere else in Europe, involving the forced emigration of well over a million people and yet it is largely forgotten by a Europe which prefers not to dwell on the terrible events of the 20th century.

Old cathedral of Kaliningrad

While the lands of East Prussia have buried their German past, it is perhaps Kaliningrad which shows the most dramatic change since it was the German city-port of Königsberg.   With the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1989 the territory around Kaliningrad has been part of the Russian Federation but has had no land connection to the rest of Russia.  When Max Egremont visited it in 1992 he found it “a parody of Soviet planning, with cracked concrete, cratered streets, people bend against the cold and wet . . .”.    In the post-Soviet age he finds “black limousines and dark-suited security guards . . . wait outside the Kaliningrad clubs, restaurants and hotels; the show of money mocks any idea of communism”.  The tourists are mainly German, relatives and descendants of those who were expelled in 1945, or even elderly former residents who found themselves “overwhelmed, bursting into tears at the memory of terror or loss”.

East Prussia has, as Egremont puts it, “a layered history”, the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky writing that “the trees whisper in German”. A couple of years ago I reviewed Elizabeth Denny’s The Fall of Hitler’s Fortress City, in which she writes of visiting Kaliningrad and finding that “one cannot escape an uncanny feeling of the old Königsberg, like the negative of a damaged photograph, lying ten to twenty feet underneath the city’s surface”.  This layering is reflected in the subtitle to Max Egremont’s book, “Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia”.

Käthe Kollwitz - The Grieving Parents

At times the book seems to go off at a bit of a tangent.  For example, it is not immediately clear why we are treated to a chapter of mini-biography of the artist and sculptor Kath Kollwitz, particularly when it focuses on her years in Berlin.  Similarly, the passages on the memorials at Ypres, while relevant in terms of highlighting the tragedy of war seem not quite relevant to this book of explorations of East Prussia.  I really didn’t mind these digressions because Max Egremont is a writer with the gift of illuminating dark places,  providing a list of such in his chapter on Ypres,

certain landscapes are overshadowed by what happened or even by what was conceived there:  Hitler’s beloved Bavarian Alps; the still empty centre of Kaliningrad; the death camps. . . ; the forests of Belarus, eastern Poland and Ukraine where the Soviets and the Germans killed millions; the Wolf’s Lair . . .

Military victories in East Prussia during World War I became totemic symbols of German deliverance during the 1930s with General Von Hindenburg, who led the German armies in the Battle of Tannenburg, providing a potent symbol of Germanic heroism as he “stands in the snow, a Prussian spiked helmet on his head, binoculars in one hand, the other clutching his ceremonial sword”.  In later years, the Nazis “made sure that whenever Hindenburg did appear in public it was in Hitler’s company. During these appearances, Hitler always made a point of showing the utmost respect and reverence for the President” (from Wikipedia).  Max Egremont suggests however that the sending of huge reinforcements into East Prussia may so have  depleted the forces fighting in France at a critical time and that it may actually have prevented the Germans from winning World War I.

The book is a mixture of interviews old and new – Max Egremont had extended conversations with Marion Donhoff, writer and states-woman, who was born in what is now Kaliningrad and fled before the invading Soviet army on horseback to Hamburg, later becoming editor and publisher of the liberal newspaper Die Zeit.

A chapter on Königsberg poet Agnes Miegel reminds us of the life-long pull of a homeland on those who suffered exile, her poem “Es War Ein Land” expressing the feelings of thousands of Germans who had to flee westwards in order to survive -

Once there was this land—we loved this land—yet horror fell upon it just as dunes of sand.
As elks in marsh and meadow vanished, so the trace of man and beast is lost.
They froze in snow, they scorched in flames, how miserably they wasted in the hands of strangers. (see Wikipedia)

zelenogradsk (formerly Cranz)

Thomas Mann, who originated from the western end of the Baltic at Lubeck, fell in love with the wild coastline of the long spit of land near Zelenogradsk and used his Nobel prize money to build a summer house there which has somehow survived the upheavals of the years. The greatest name associated with the area is of course the philosopher Emmanuel Kant whose name keeps coming up in the book  – we learn much about Kant’s years in Königsberg and also his current influence, with ongoing proposals that the name of Kaliningrad be changed to Kantgrad.

A minor criticism of the book is that it darts about rather more than is necessary and I sometimes felt that a better ordering of the material would have been welcome – the book jumps about between one era and another and in some ways is more an anthology of miscellaneous writings about East Prussia than a travel or history book.  However, its important to say that each chapter and section is well worth reading and even when Max Egremont goes off on one of his many digressions he is always interesting.  He seems at times to have trawled through every possible reference to the area even bringing in references to a forgotten British cycle traveller, Arnold Wilson, who passed through the region on a Baltic tour.

Of course, it is impossible to write about the region without touching on the horrors of the conclusion of World War II.  The last days before the Russians invaded were terrible times, with concentration camps being emptied and their prisoners being marched off to die in forests and even being driven into the sea to drown.  When the Russian Army came they brought their own brand of terror onto those who had not fled and Max Egremont recounts eye-witness reports of the killings and rapes inflicted on the remaining German residents.  It must be a strange experience to visit towns like Kaliningrad and to remember the layered history now obliterated by the new townscape.

Having finished this book I believe it is going to be a vital reference book for anyone interested in this region and its troubled history.  I can’t think how any future work could be more comprehensive in its range, covering as it does the social, cultural and political history of East Prussia.  While I wonder whether an editor couldn’t have slightly improved the arrangement of the material there is no doubting the quality of the writing or the depth of the research – and of course the many interviews the author conducted which have contributed much original material which cannot be found elsewhere.  I would highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the region but also to anyone who enjoys reading well-written modern history.

Publishing format

The book contains a number of photographs, but these are printed in-line with the text and therefore lose definition.  On a book of this price, it is a shame that the publishers, Picador, could not provide a photograph section on glossy paper.  I also felt that there were not enough maps.  While the main map in the front is useful, the book sorely lacks maps showing the national boundaries at different stages of history. 

I regret that the book was not published simultaneously in paper and e-book format.  I have got used to making annotations by highlighting text on my e-reader and quotations by cutting and pasting, and I had to revert to pen and paper and later typing up my notes while reading this book.  The index is good, but not as effective as an electronic search feature.  It is also a book to read with the Internet to hand.  This is a finely detailed book and there is a vast array of maps, images and other supporting material available online to enrich the reading experience – the e-book format makes Internet cross-referencing so much easier to do.  A few years from now it will seem incredible that a reference book like this was not immediately available as an electronic text.

Various links

Museum of Königsberg

Wikipedia article on East Prussia

Wikipedia article on Käthe Kollwitz

Wikipedia article on Agnes Miegel

Wikipedia article on Paul von Hindenburg

Although Susie Kelly has a number of print books to her name, the book under review here, The Valley of Heaven and Hell – Cycling in the Shadow of Marie-Antoinette, (non-UK readers and people with ereaders other than Kindle can purchase from the links at the end of this review) is published only in ebook format, and as someone who enjoys reading about travel on foot or bicycle I can say its as good as any I’ve read and is a massively entertaining and satisfying read.  Not only is is about a cycle ride, but Susie Kelly has linked the journey to a historical journey, in this case, the route Marie Antoinette and her husband Louis XV1 took to escape from Paris.  The escapees were apprehended at Varennes and then had to return to Paris under escort, thus providing the modern-day cyclists with a return journey of equal interest.

One advantage of an ebook is that hyperlinks are provided to many of the places visited. By using the Amazon “Kindle for PC” as well as the Kindle itself, it was easy to click on the links and see photographs and further information about the various locations.

The appeal of this book is its contrast between the stories which will inevitably arise when cycle-camping and the tragic events in the life of Marie Antoinette – a character for whom Susie Kelly has immense sympathy.  The poor Austrian princess was betrothed to marry Louis, a second cousin when she was only ten years old and was handed over to the French at the age of 15 to a most unattractive lumpen young man who at first took little interest in his new bride.  Her whole life was then lived in public, with audiences even watching the royal couple eat their meals.  Susie Kelly describes the unreal life of the young Queen of France and it is difficult not to share her liking for this much-maligned empress.

Susie’s journey with her husband Matthew begins in Paris.  Cycling in this bustling city is far from easy, and their hotel (the camping comes later) is surrounded by impenetrable road-works which provide confusion and noise sufficient to blight their first day on the road.

. . . the road is trembling beneath roaring machines gouging up the tarmac around the station. Temporary wooden walkways have been set up to allow pedestrians to move from one place to another; however, they are rather narrow, with sharp bends around which it is impossible to steer a bicycle carrying a wide load such as mine, as I discover about half way along. This means wheeling the machine backwards, against the oncoming crowds, the most difficult challenge so far on this afternoon of trials . . .

This is the first of many times when cycling is going to prove a very arduous experience for Susie and her husband Terry, even though Susie is equipped with an electric bike, this often proves to be less manoeuvrable and also heavier than her husband’s leg-powered model.

Although the journey is not very long in terms of cycle tours, the experience of camping is as always an unpredictable affair.  The first time I camped in France I found the sites could be a very mixed bag, and the site wardens could be a difficult bunch.  I always found it unsettling that they took our  passports away when I registered and didn’t return it until we left the site.  Sometimes the rules of the site seemed bizarre, while other times you could just turn up, pitch your tent and do what you liked.  I learned always to take masses of bedding with me – like Susie, I found that camping in June is no guarantee of warm nights -

After we’d shivered for an hour we writhed with great difficulty, in the limited space and pitch darkness, into all our cycling clothes. Then we spread over ourselves an aluminium survival blanket, and over that our wet waterproof coats. The whole lot slithered about noisily every time we moved without noticeably adding any warmth, and our faces occasionally brushed against the damp and clammy walls of the tent. There was continual noise from aircraft, trains, cars, roaring motorbikes and barking dogs.

Chalons en Champagne

We are treated to a history of Champagne as the riders cycle through Epernay and Chalons.  We were there last year and noticed like Susie that the region is not the most beautiful in France but has lots to interest.  The little town of Chalons en Champagne is a gem of a place and my wife and I walked through park surrounded by historic buildings then sat at a café table enjoying looking at the half-timbered houses around us.

Before long, the travellers reach Reims and book into an hotel during the annual folk-lore festival and pageant in honour of Joan of Arc.  This sounds a fantastic affair, the streets crowded with visitors from all over the world, with “a cacophony of sounds, cocktail of smells and a panorama of sights”.   They manage to get their bikes safely into their tiny hotel room (a story in itself), and then bask in the incredible mix of experiences presented by the festival.

Susie and Terry have a fantastic time at the festival, but later in Reims cathedral, she is overwhelmed by a numinous experience which leave her overcome with emotion.  And this is one of the features of this book, the mixture of light-heartedness with the sombreness of tone brought by her reflections on the World War 1 battlefields of the Marne or the tragedy of Marie Antoinette’s life.

You have to admire Susie and Terry’s persistence.  At one point, rather than go travel along roads, they choose a canal-side route, but this proves to be more difficult than expected.

We battered our way through the jungular undergrowth beside the river, bouncing over rocks and tussocks. It was extraordinarily hard work keeping the wheels in the ruts. My head ached from the fierceness of concentrating. My hands dripped perspiration, and when I tried to change gear they slipped on the handles. The long grass poked through our wheel spokes, frequently tangling itself so thoroughly that the wheels were brought to a sudden halt. I was first to fall off. . .

I’ve cycled along canal tow-paths myself and found them to be full of tree-roots and sudden ditches – to attempt it while carrying full camping gear is not something I would choose, and when Susie and Terry encounter a long tunnel with a narrow towpath winding into the darkness, I think I would have given up.

Susie insisted on visiting every site she could find that had any link to the journey of Marie Antoinette and her husband.  This takes her into some spectacularly beautiful buildings, but also some which are frankly disappointing.  After the revolution, the remains of all the royals dating back to the 6th century ended up as a jumble of bones residing in the Church of St Denis in Paris – a building of “unkempt and dismal appearance”.  Susie finds the tombs of Louis and Marie-Antoinette down in the crypt but there is no guarantee that after the turmoil of the Revolution that the correct bones were deposited in them.

The French seems to have a very equivocal of their royalty – in Britain most people have a half-hearted interest in  their royal history while grudgingly acknowledging its significance.  In France, the attitude seems to have become complicated by pride in the Republic and a reluctance to condemn the revolutionaries who dealt so harshly with kings like Louis who Susie describes as,

a kindly, humane king who wanted to improve the lives of the poor and underprivileged. Louis XVI abolished the forced unpaid labour previously imposed upon the peasants. He banned the use of torture as a means of extracting confessions. Under his rule Protestants, discriminated against since the time of Louis XIV, were tolerated, and the hitherto harsh taxation of Jews was lifted.

I have enjoyed this book not only as an entertaining “traveller’s tale” but also for the insight it has given me into the bloody phase of French history which so marks the landscape of Paris and the surrounding cities.  It is difficult to fault The Valley of Heaven and Hell and for the price of £1.39 it seems remarkable value.

This book can also be purchased from here and here.

Travels with a Donkey, covers twelve days during which Stevenson made a 120 mile hike while in his late twenties.  His journey took him through the remote, mountainous region of the Cevennes in southern France, and to make his passage easier he decided to load his packs onto a donkey, whom he christened Modestine.  Alas, poor Modestine proved to be a very difficult beast to manage, needing the stick rather than the carrot for the majority of the journey.  Even sticks proved to be largely ineffective in driving Modestine on, and it was only when the inn-keeper of Bouchet St Nicholas made Stevenson a goad (a stick with a sharp point on the end) that any progress was made.

By modern standards, Stevenson’s equipment seems extensive and it does not seem unreasonable that he needed the services of a donkey to carry it all.  He had a sleeping bag made up from green waterproof cart-cloth, with a lining of sheep-skin.  He took a revolver, a spirit lamp, a lantern and candles, a jack-knife and a large leather flask.  Two complete changes of warm clothing were added, some books, a railway rug and an extensive larder including bottles of Beaujolais and brandy, and also a range of cooking equipment.  No wonder the donkey was required.  Stevenson didn’t take a tent with him as he was able to sleep in his “bivvy bag” and it seemed to do quite a good job of protecting him from the elements.

The book is pure travelogue, but with a humorous tinge, reminding me a little of Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, particularly in the passages where Stevenson describes his troubles with Modestine.  The Cevennes in 1878 was a wild region, with tiny town and villages providing little comfort after a day in the hills. When not sleeping in his sleeping sack, he stayed in some very basic inns, usually finding a communal bedroom, and with surprising room-mates -

The sleeping-room was furnished with two beds.  I had one; and I will own I was a little abashed to find a young man and his wife and child in the act of mounting into the other.  This was my first experience of the sort; and if I am always to feel equally silly and extraneous, I pray God it be my last as well.  I kept my eyes to myself, and know nothing of the woman except that she had beautiful arms, and seemed no whit embarrassed by my appearance.

Stevenson’s problems were often made worse because his days were long and he often had to knock on doors at night in order to find hospitality.  He spent quite a bit of his time completely lost, and the local population were not always keen on helping him find his way.  There was a fair amount of doubling back and frustrating diversions.  Sometimes however, Stevenson experienced that sense of elation and timelessness known to all walkers, and he was prompted to describe his walk in almost lyrical passages -

We struck at last into a wide white high-road carpeted with noiseless dust.  The night had come; the moon had been shining for a long while upon the opposite mountain; when on turning a corner my donkey and I issued ourselves into her light.  I had emptied out my brandy at Florac, for I could bear the stuff no longer, and replaced it with some generous and scented Volnay; and now I drank to the moon’s sacred majesty upon the road.  It was but a couple of mouthfuls; yet I became thenceforth unconscious of my limbs, and my blood flowed with luxury.  Even Modestine was inspired by this purified nocturnal sunshine, and bestirred her little hoofs as to a livelier measure.  The road wound and descended swiftly among masses of chestnuts.  Hot dust rose from our feet and flowed away.

Stevenson called on a Trappist monastery, the Monastery of Our Lady of the Snows (an interesting article about this can be found here, complete with photographs).  His strong Protestant background made this a challenging experience for him but he found himself impressed with the simplicity and quality of life of the monks who despite their Catholicism (and their attempts to convert him to it) seemed to be a fine example of Christian living -

Into how many houses would not the note of the monastery bell, dividing the day into manageable portions, bring peace of mind and healthful activity of body!  We speak of hardships, but the true hardship is to be a dull fool, and permitted to mismanage life in our own dull and foolish manner. . . There were none of those circumstances which strike the Protestant as childish or as tawdry in the public offices of Rome.  A stern simplicity, heightened by the romance of the surroundings, spoke directly to the heart.

In the century before Stevenson’s travel, the Cevennes had known religious persecution when the Protestant movement known as the Camisards raised an insurrection leading to suppression and martyrdom before peace was restored.   When Stevenson encountered the descendants of the Camisards he felt among his own people:

I own I met these Protestants with a delight and a sense of coming home.  I was accustomed to speak their language, in another and deeper sense of the word than that which distinguishes between French and English; for the true Babel is a divergence upon morals.

Despite this he felt strongly that conversion from Protestantism to Rome or vice versa was not a good thing.  In a passage which would perhaps speak to those Anglican congregations who are currently leaving the Church of England to join the Catholic Church -

It’s not only a great flight of confidence for a man to change his creed and go out of his family for heaven’s sake; but the odds are—nay, and the hope is—that, with all this great transition in the eyes of man, he has not changed himself a hairbreadth to the eyes of God.  Honour to those who do so, for the wrench is sore.  But it argues something narrow, whether of strength or weakness, whether of the prophet or the fool, in those who can take a sufficient interest in such infinitesimal and human operations, or who can quit a friendship for a doubtful process of the mind.

I found this little book a delight all round.  Stevenson, although only in his late twenties when he made this journey, was already showing a breadth of mind which seemed far removed from what you expect from a 19th century Scottish Protestant.  Since reading Travels with a Donkey I have read much more about Stevenson and found that he had a short but memorable life, all the roots of which can be found in his travels in the Cevennes. It would be an inspiring thing to walk the same route today and every indication is that it would not be all that different under modern conditions, apart from improvements in the hotels and restaurants along the way.

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Chris Stewart’s books are firmly in this category, and I can say they are among the best.  Ever since his hugely successful Driving Over Lemons, Chris has charmed us with his light-hearted approach to seemingly impossible challenges.  I remember reading “Lemons” during a period of commuting to London in a cold winter and turning away from views across Battersea to Chris’s descriptions of Andalucia, which helped me forget that I was about to join the “I did not know death had undone so many” hoards scurrying over Waterloo Bridge.

Chris Stewart is a little like Michael Palin, in that he seems to be a genuinely nice guy, an ideal travel companion, even on the printed page. John McCarthy interviewed him on Radio 4′s Excess Baggage last week about his new book Three Ways to Capsize a Boat and clearly Chris is a generous-minded man, given to self-deprecation and complete lack of boasting.  I had this book on my “to be read pile” at the time, and as I injured my knee last Sunday and was pretty much bed-ridden from Monday to Wednesday, I decided to promote “Three Ways” to the top of the pile and see if Chris could lighten my mood as he did those years ago while on the commuter train.

Needless to say, I made a good choice, for straight-away I was reading about a job offer Chris received to skipper of a boat around the islands of Greece on a sort of private cruise for an elderly couple.  As Chris at the time had never sailed before, we read first about his exploits with his friend Keith, who offered to teach him the basics – only just avoiding on several occasions the watery ending which awaits amateur mariners.  Chris takes to sailing rather well however and by the end of the first section of his book he has gained the Competent Crew and Day Skipper certificates which he needs to take on his new job in the Mediterranean.

He flies off to Greece to supervise some work being done on the boat he is to sail, but finds that Captain Bob, who had been entrusted with working on the boat, had done no work at all and had left it as a near wreck in a boat graveyard.  Chris managed to find a couple of Greek boat repairers who agreed to take on his boat-restoration project and the boat, an old Cornish Crabber, is made sea-worthy just in time for the summer cruise.  The rest of the summer passes with voyages to pine-scented islands where long lunches are taken in the villas of friends.

The next section is far more dramatic, for it describes Chris’s voyage across the North Atlantic as a crew member with the famous Tom Cunliffe – with whom I share my name.  I am not sure its a good thing to share your name with someone who is such a high-achiever and whenever the great sailor is mentioned I have to remind myself of my own small achievements to avoid feelings of inferiority!  However, It is really good to read this first-hand account of my namesake.  He is a very impressive character indeed, not only being a highly renowned sailor but also having ridden 12000 miles across America on a Harley Davidson motorcycle.

Anyway, to get to the point, Tom invites Chris to crew on his vintage Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter, “Hirta” on a voyage up to Norway and across the North Atlantic to Iceland, and then up to Greenland and on to Newfoundland.  An epic voyage indeed.

This turns out to be a different type of sailing altogether and although Chris writes in his usual light-hearted style, it is more than obvious that at times they stared into the jaws of death and survival was by no means certain.  The Force 10 storm which caused the boat to be battened down for three days, was clearly about as near to disaster as it is possible to get.  During that terrible period the crew still had to take it in turns to keep watch on deck in horrendous conditions.  Not that conditions were much better in the cabin where space was at a premium and home comforts almost nil.

Later, off the coast of Greenland they encountered “growlers”, huge chunks of floating ice which could easily put a hole in the wooden hull of Hirta and sink her.  This meant that two people had to be on watch all the time, one at the wheel and one at the prow watching out for the growlers.

This book is rather different to Chris’s earlier books, mainly because in the last section the story becomes so much more dramatic.  We are dealing with serious stuff here, for there would be no life-boat to sail out to rescue the beleaguered Hirta.

While lying on my bed waiting for my knee to recover a little, this book was the perfect accompaniment.  Humorous, dramatic, dealing with places far from my South Coast home, it took me out of myself for a few hours.  It is a beautifully produced little volume and while it would make an ideal present (for the imminent Father’s Day perhaps?), it is also worth buying for yourself where it will definitely not be a volume which ends up on the charity shop re-cycling pile.

It goes without saying that Thubron writes well. This is literate travel writing which does not attempt to woo the reader with humour or pointless anecdotes. Every word is there for a purpose, and this is a book to be read slowly and savoured.

The journey is fascinating. Through northern China, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, then through Iran and into Turkey, we visit places which are definitely off the tourist trail.  Thubron had to work hard to get past border posts and pushed his luck with renegade officials to a startling degree, in order to get into the heart of tribal lands, where the reader feels he will find it hard to leave in one piece.  His descriptions of landscape are magnificent – we can feel the desolation of the Gobi desert, and he uses more adjectives to describe mountain ranges than I would have thought possible.  We read of the time of change which has come to these lands, but frankly, this is nothing new for them, for Thubron tells us of their troubled pasts, with marauding armies constantly laying waste and altering boundaries until the rise of the next dispensation.  The people he describes seem to have survived constant massacre and genocide, and yet retained their culture, their language and their physical characteristics.

I wondered about the lack of photographs in the book, and then towards the end, when crossing a border, Thubron lets slip that it was easier because he did not carry a camera. While accepting that in some of the regions he visited, a camera would have resulted in his entry being blocked, I do feel that some photographs would have helped fill in some of the inevitable gaps in the word pictures Thubron paints so readily.  This is a small criticism however of what is an extremely high quality piece of travel writing, and which is definitely one I will not be recycling.