Travel writing is mostly seen as a distinct genre. But travel,
war and history can come together. Two fine books in which they do
When
a book is published, it’ll be assigned a genre, and classified on
Amazon and other sites as fantasy, urban fantasy, paranormal,
history, travel or whatever. That’s inevitable. People need to
search for what they want, and if you don’t define a book, no
search engine will find it. Besides, humans have an urge to classify.
But that does mean that, when a book is hard to label, it may be hard
to find. This is a pity, because they can be the most intriguing
books of all.
Both
the books I’m looking at here defy classification, and maybe their
writers do too. Tim Butcher is a journalist who covered the Balkan
wars for Britain’s The Daily Telegraph, and also served
as its Africa correspondent. He’s since turned to books, and carved
out a place for himself as a writer who can combine travelogue,
history, war and politics in an original and interesting way.
Norman
Lewis is a writer from an earlier generation (he died in 2003 at the
age of 95), and is now seen as one of the first real travel writers,
but he too is not so easily classified; his article on the treatment
of indigenous people in the Amazon basin, Genocide in Brazil,
published in the The Sunday Times in 1968, led to
the founding of Survival International. But he had had a
long-standing interest in the security of indigenous peoples,
prompted by travels in Guatemala after the Second World War. Butcher
has written several books so far; Lewis wrote dozens, including
fiction. But I’m looking at just one from each man here.
*
First,
Tim Butcher’s The
Trigger – Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War is
a walk through the Balkans in the footsteps of Gavrilo Princip, the
assassin whose bullet killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June
1914, starting the crisis that led to the First World War. I wasn’t
especially interested in the subject of this book, Gavrilo Princip,
to begin with; I read it because I had been impressed by one of Tim
Butcher’s earlier books, Blood
River,
an exciting and well-written account of a long and dangerous journey
through Central Africa. Like Blood
River,The
Trigger is
a mixture of history, travelogue and journalism – a format Butcher
does very well. It is just as good as Blood
River,
and I ended up being very interested in Princip indeed.
The outline of the book is thus: In the early 1990s Butcher is a young correspondent in the Balkans, covering the conflict for theTelegraph. In Sarajevo he finds people using a small building as a toilet, and is bemused to find that it is the mausoleum of Princip. Butcher moves on but does not forget this odd sight, and in 2012 he resolves to walk across Bosnia and Serbia in Princip’s footsteps. Butcher wants to see if the journey would illuminate the chain of events that had led not only to that war but to the one he covered 80 years later.
In 1907 the 13-year-old Princip walked most of the way from his home in Western Bosnia to Sarajevo to get an education. Later, as a radicalised, political young adult, he went to Serbia and there hatched the plot to kill the Archduke; then, armed, he walked back. It is these journeys Butcher wants to recreate. He starts by enlisting Arnie, his former fixer from Bosnia, as a companion. Arnie, a Bosnian Muslim, is now living in London but, after some thought, he agrees. Meanwhile Butcher tries to track down Princip’s birthplace, Obljaj. This is hard, as it is an obscure hamlet deep in what Bosnians call the vukojebina (literally, “where the wolves f**k”). He eventually finds it on an old map in the bowels of the Royal Geographical Society. He and Arnie make for Obljaj. It’s when they get there that this narrative, a little slow to start, really takes off. The Princip home is a ruin but, quite unexpectedly, they find the Princip clan still living next door. No-one can remember Gavrilo, who died in prison in 1918. But at least one man remembers his parents in their old age, and the folk-memories of Princip are strong.
The outline of the book is thus: In the early 1990s Butcher is a young correspondent in the Balkans, covering the conflict for theTelegraph. In Sarajevo he finds people using a small building as a toilet, and is bemused to find that it is the mausoleum of Princip. Butcher moves on but does not forget this odd sight, and in 2012 he resolves to walk across Bosnia and Serbia in Princip’s footsteps. Butcher wants to see if the journey would illuminate the chain of events that had led not only to that war but to the one he covered 80 years later.
In 1907 the 13-year-old Princip walked most of the way from his home in Western Bosnia to Sarajevo to get an education. Later, as a radicalised, political young adult, he went to Serbia and there hatched the plot to kill the Archduke; then, armed, he walked back. It is these journeys Butcher wants to recreate. He starts by enlisting Arnie, his former fixer from Bosnia, as a companion. Arnie, a Bosnian Muslim, is now living in London but, after some thought, he agrees. Meanwhile Butcher tries to track down Princip’s birthplace, Obljaj. This is hard, as it is an obscure hamlet deep in what Bosnians call the vukojebina (literally, “where the wolves f**k”). He eventually finds it on an old map in the bowels of the Royal Geographical Society. He and Arnie make for Obljaj. It’s when they get there that this narrative, a little slow to start, really takes off. The Princip home is a ruin but, quite unexpectedly, they find the Princip clan still living next door. No-one can remember Gavrilo, who died in prison in 1918. But at least one man remembers his parents in their old age, and the folk-memories of Princip are strong.
The
next day Butcher and Arnie start a long walk to Sarajevo. The
memories of the Princips, and Butcher’s own diligent research in
Sarajevo, uncover a great deal new about the assassin. His killing of
the Archduke is part of history but the man himself, locked up at 19,
dead at 23, has always been a footnote. Butcher brings him very
alive. He also conjures up a vivid picture of Sarajevo as Princip
would have found it in 1907, and it reminds me very much of Aleppo,
where I lived for several years in the 1990s.
Moreover Butcher finds that Princip’s story does provide keys to the region’s history, and to the conflict of the 1990s. One or two themes emerge strongly from the book. In Butcher’s view, Austria-Hungary, which had only occupied Bosnia in 1878, was a colonial power there, extracting resources – chiefly timber; it did give a little back, but not much. Princip’s fanaticism was rooted in a hatred of what he saw as an oppressive colonial regime that had kept his people miserably poor. (He was himself the seventh of nine children; the previous six had all died in infancy.) Moreover, according to Butcher, the people Princip saw as his were all the South Slavs, not just Serbs. He was thus not a Serbian nationalist as such (and in Butcher’s view, Serbia was not behind the assassination). Instead, Butcher sees him as an anti-colonial freedom fighter. It is not a universal view of Princip, especially in modern Bosnia. But Butcher argues the case very well.
However, one of the most interesting perspectives in this book is Arnie’s. At the time people outside Yugoslavia blamed the 1990s war on ancient primitive hatreds, rather as they spoke of Northern Ireland when I was growing up, and see Syria now. Arnie doesn’t buy it. “Those people who said, ‘These people have always hated each other’ were just being lazy,” he tells Butcher. “In my own life I saw people from different communities work together, live together, get married even. There was nothing inevitable about what happened in the 1990s. It was just that a few – the extremists, the elite, the greedy – saw nationalism as a way to grab what they wanted.”
Like Blood River, this is a thoughtful, well-written book, an absorbing read but also full of insights. Butcher’s knack of combining several roles – the historian, the travel writer and the journalist – serves him well. I look forward to seeing where he does it next. Meanwhile The Trigger is excellent, and was my non-fiction read of the year in 2014 when it came out.
*
So to the second of these two writers - Norman Lewis.
As
stated earlier, I have heard Lewis referred to as the first
really modern travel writer, but I am not sure he is so easily
defined, and besides I wonder if he was really the first. However,
the sheer volume and quality of Lewis’s work do mark him out. The
Tomb in Seville: Crossing Spain on the Brink of Civil War was
his last book and was published posthumously in the autumn of 2003;
he had died several months earlier at the age of 95.
Lewis
was born in 1908, in London but to Welsh parents. Both were ardent
spiritualists, and his upbringing (described vividly in his first
volume of autobiography, Jackdaw
Cake),
was strange. As a young man he pursued various ventures, including
the motor trade and motor racing, and was married, quite young, to
the daughter of a Sicilian of noble Spanish descent, Ernesto
Corvaja.
In September 1934, Corvaja sent Lewis on a mission to Seville in search of the Corvaja ancestral tomb, which he hoped would be found in the cathedral. His son, Eugene Corvaja, travelled with Lewis.The Tomb in Seville: Crossing Spain on the Brink of Civil War is the account of their journey.
There are some very odd things about this book, not least that it appeared not just posthumously but nearly 70 years after the journey it described. At the time, at least one critic expressed wonder that Lewis should still be writing so well in his 90s, but one wonders if this book was actually written much earlier. It may be that Lewis intended it as part of Jackdaw Cake, published nearly 20 years before - but then held it back for some reason, so that it remained unfinished business for decades. Certainly it has the air of something written much sooner after the event than 70 years.
Equally odd was the timing of their journey. Spain was politically very tense – so much so that October 1934 saw a brief civil war in Spain; it ended quickly, but was a savagely violent interlude, the precursor to the larger conflict that was to follow less than two years later. At one point, Lewis and the younger Corvaja have to secure a place on an armoured train that takes them to Madrid. Here they alight to find themselves in the middle of a firefight, and as they dodge bullets to leave the station, Lewis notices a poster that assures them, in English, that “Spain Attracts and Holds You. Under the Blue Skies of Spain Cares Are Forgotten.”
The book is packed with bizarre incident. As the fighting comes to an end, Lewis and Eugene Corvaja attend a bullfight, and see the rejoneador (a lead bullfighter who fights with a lance) apparently gored to death; “it was given out that he was dead”. (In fact he was not; I couldn’t resist checking). They then decide to investigate a reported mania amongst Madrileños for drinking animal blood. They visit a slaughterhouse, but are “deterred by a woman on her way out, made terrible by the smile painted by the blood on her lips.” Later, on their way through Portugal, the pair hear of a witch-burning, no less, in a small village in Porto called Marco do Canavezes. They travel there to find that the story is substantially true.
The book sometimes raises questions it does not answer. Why would Corvaja senior send his son and his son-in-law on a quixotic journey through Spain in a time of trouble? Did they really hear of a witch-burning in Portugal? (Marco do Canavezes - actually Canaveses - is real enough, and is, oddly, the birthplace of the singer Carmen Miranda; but I can find no mention of the witch-burning story although that does not make it false.)
But does that matter? Why strain at a story of witch-burning in 1934, when a much larger outbreak of atavistic savagery was just beginning? For the most part, the narrative seems heartfelt; the journey clearly left an impression on Lewis and, like Laurie Lee a few months later, he was struck by the poverty. In Andalusia, they “pass through settlements of windowless huts consisting of no more than holes dug in the ground with branch and straw coverings …to take the place of roofs.”
The book is also alive with Lewis's descriptive genius. Thus he and Corvaja, stranded by the conflict, must walk from city to city through the countryside:
…the rich gilding of summer returned to the Navarran landscape. …We moved across boundless plains of billowing rock purged of all colour by the sun. ...Behind the mountains ahead symmetrical and luminous clouds were poised without shift of position as we trudged towards them for hours on end. At our approach an anomalous yellow bloom shook itself from a single tree, transformed into a flock of singing green finches. Lizards, basking in the dust, came suddenly to life and streaked away into the undergrowth.
Therein lies this book’s great strength. It is intensely vivid. To be sure, the book's genesis is odd, and the circumstances of the journey mysterious; but it doesn't matter, for this is one of the best travel books of all time. Beautifully observed and written, it is like a trip through a wormhole – an almost covert glimpse of a world that has been forgotten. It is not perfect, but it does not have to be, for it has the freshness and warmth of a diary entry.
In September 1934, Corvaja sent Lewis on a mission to Seville in search of the Corvaja ancestral tomb, which he hoped would be found in the cathedral. His son, Eugene Corvaja, travelled with Lewis.The Tomb in Seville: Crossing Spain on the Brink of Civil War is the account of their journey.
There are some very odd things about this book, not least that it appeared not just posthumously but nearly 70 years after the journey it described. At the time, at least one critic expressed wonder that Lewis should still be writing so well in his 90s, but one wonders if this book was actually written much earlier. It may be that Lewis intended it as part of Jackdaw Cake, published nearly 20 years before - but then held it back for some reason, so that it remained unfinished business for decades. Certainly it has the air of something written much sooner after the event than 70 years.
Equally odd was the timing of their journey. Spain was politically very tense – so much so that October 1934 saw a brief civil war in Spain; it ended quickly, but was a savagely violent interlude, the precursor to the larger conflict that was to follow less than two years later. At one point, Lewis and the younger Corvaja have to secure a place on an armoured train that takes them to Madrid. Here they alight to find themselves in the middle of a firefight, and as they dodge bullets to leave the station, Lewis notices a poster that assures them, in English, that “Spain Attracts and Holds You. Under the Blue Skies of Spain Cares Are Forgotten.”
The book is packed with bizarre incident. As the fighting comes to an end, Lewis and Eugene Corvaja attend a bullfight, and see the rejoneador (a lead bullfighter who fights with a lance) apparently gored to death; “it was given out that he was dead”. (In fact he was not; I couldn’t resist checking). They then decide to investigate a reported mania amongst Madrileños for drinking animal blood. They visit a slaughterhouse, but are “deterred by a woman on her way out, made terrible by the smile painted by the blood on her lips.” Later, on their way through Portugal, the pair hear of a witch-burning, no less, in a small village in Porto called Marco do Canavezes. They travel there to find that the story is substantially true.
The book sometimes raises questions it does not answer. Why would Corvaja senior send his son and his son-in-law on a quixotic journey through Spain in a time of trouble? Did they really hear of a witch-burning in Portugal? (Marco do Canavezes - actually Canaveses - is real enough, and is, oddly, the birthplace of the singer Carmen Miranda; but I can find no mention of the witch-burning story although that does not make it false.)
But does that matter? Why strain at a story of witch-burning in 1934, when a much larger outbreak of atavistic savagery was just beginning? For the most part, the narrative seems heartfelt; the journey clearly left an impression on Lewis and, like Laurie Lee a few months later, he was struck by the poverty. In Andalusia, they “pass through settlements of windowless huts consisting of no more than holes dug in the ground with branch and straw coverings …to take the place of roofs.”
The book is also alive with Lewis's descriptive genius. Thus he and Corvaja, stranded by the conflict, must walk from city to city through the countryside:
…the rich gilding of summer returned to the Navarran landscape. …We moved across boundless plains of billowing rock purged of all colour by the sun. ...Behind the mountains ahead symmetrical and luminous clouds were poised without shift of position as we trudged towards them for hours on end. At our approach an anomalous yellow bloom shook itself from a single tree, transformed into a flock of singing green finches. Lizards, basking in the dust, came suddenly to life and streaked away into the undergrowth.
Therein lies this book’s great strength. It is intensely vivid. To be sure, the book's genesis is odd, and the circumstances of the journey mysterious; but it doesn't matter, for this is one of the best travel books of all time. Beautifully observed and written, it is like a trip through a wormhole – an almost covert glimpse of a world that has been forgotten. It is not perfect, but it does not have to be, for it has the freshness and warmth of a diary entry.
We
should be grateful to both Butcher
and to Lewis. There is nothing wrong with the conventional
travelogue, but these books give us much more. The journeys they
describe are 80 years apart, but they have something crucial in
common; there is a sense of time as well of place.
Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.
