Word: glazebrook
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Before beginning a slow lap around Turkey, before numberless encounters with melons, rugs, mustaches and ruins, Philip Glazebrook asks his big question: "What was the impulse which drove middle-class Victorians to leave the country they loved so chauvinistically, and the company of the race they considered God's last word in breeding, to travel in discomfort, danger, illness, filth and misery among Asiatics whose morals and habits they despised...
...enchanters in the East. The heroes of antiquity, the knights-errant and the pathfinders of empire, symbolized virtues that quickened young hearts. But mercantile Britain offered few opportunities for a romantic. "Where was the use of valor and a knowledge of Xenophon and all the rest of the accoutrements?" Glazebrook inquires. "He had put on knight's armor to play croquet...
...author, a novelist when closer to home (The Eye of the Beholder, Byzantine Honeymoon), suits up in deflective irony for a different game: to produce a travel book with the confident style of the 19th century and the elegiac soul of a modern spiritual nomad. Glazebrook's reflections on the past are a form of detachment as real as the thousands of miles between him and his family in Dorset. Writing about other travel writers distances him from his own encounters on the trail. By ranking subjectivity above literal facts, he finally removes himself to that lonely height where...
...Wisely, Glazebrook keeps this sort of modernist baggage to a minimum. He knows what readers want from a travel book, and he does not disappoint them. His route, from the Aegean coast to the borders of Iran and the Soviet Union, stretches like an ancient weft on which history and legend are tightly knotted. This has a sumptuous effect on his prose: "We were surging through bright water off the promontory of Knidos, to which Praxiteles' Venus once drew all travelers . .. Here were the ramparts of Asia crumbling into a sapphire...
...mountain passages of this part of the world were like the bloody birth canals of civilization. Today Glazebrook finds mostly shards and indifferent descendants. Like VS. Naipaul, the best of contemporary novelist-travel writers, he takes a melancholy view of lands that are past their primes. In the city of Kenya he discovers a universal shabbiness imposed by the use of concrete: "The Asiatics' love of bright colors, too, is betrayed by the plastic paint they slap on everywhere, which flakes and peels as the colors of their native fabrics and tiles never did." A few passages border...