I've not read the first part of Leigh Fermor's travel memoirs, but this second volume recounts his travels as a young man across central Europe in the summer of 1934—an epic journey by foot through a landscape that was about to be altered irrevocably by the Second World War, by Communism, and by the redrawing of national boundaries. His description of a vanished world is fascinating: a world where the aristocracy of the old Austria-Hungary still survived, albeit in reduced circumstances; where people farm a land that seems all but untouched by the Industrial Revolution; where Turkish and Jewish and Roma and Sinti populations still form a large proportion of the local inhabitants.

The one thing which made me squirm about the book was that, although written at the remove of some fifty years, and although Leigh Fermor clearly has a great deal of admiration and interest for the peoples he meets, there is quite a deal of unexamined prejudice going on—the Romans bring civilisation, but the Mongols (looking out at the world from beneath the 'epicanthic folds' of their eyelids, I kid you not) were barbarians; Judaism, compared to Christianity and Islam, is 'in the position of a [hag-ridden] King Lear.' A highly interesting read, but one very much of its (the author's?) time. ( )

This second part of Patrick Leigh Fermor's journey to Constantinople takes us through the idyllic summer of 1934, from Easter day in Esztergom to the beginning of Autumn at the Iron Gates. The style of travel has changed rather: although he is still mostly walking, in A time of gifts, he had been living the life of the impecunious student traveller, sleeping rough or in cheap hotels and hostels, but since Munich he has been caught up in a chain of letters of introduction, moving from castle to castle as he enjoys the generous hospitality of the central European aristocracy.

In other circumstances we might be inclined to be rather disparaging about this endless procession of good luck and connections, but since we know that most of these wonderful characters are living on borrowed time, we can just sit back and enjoy it with him. And there is a lot to enjoy. We follow the author riding a borrowed horse over the Hungarian plain, dredging up forgotten fragments of Hindi and George Borrow to communicate with Gypsies in their own language, romping in cornfields with farmgirls, pursuing a clandestine liaison with a married woman during a Dornford Yates-style motor tour of the Carpathians and discovering common ground with an orthodox Rabbi in a remote logging camp.

There's an extra layer of irony when we read this book now - Leigh Fermor couldn't know when he was writing in 1986 that the map of Eastern Europe was about to be redrawn yet again. Possibly it was this that broke the flow — in any event, we're still waiting for the promised third part of the journey to Constantinople. ( )

Danube River Valley > Description and travel/Europe, Eastern > Description and travel/Fermor, Patrick Leigh

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Two brilliant, brilliant books of travel writing: the first describes Leigh Fermor's journey on foot through the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia in the winter and spring of 1933 and 1934; the second takes him on through Hungary and Romania. They were written respectively forty and fifty years after the events described; the second volume ends with the promise "to be concluded", but it seems now unlikely that Leigh Fermor himself will finalise the account of his journey to Constantinople. (He is 92.)

The two books struck me slightly differently. I know the territory of the first one much better - as a teenager I explored Cologne, had an exchange with a family near Wiesbaden, went on a student visit to Heidelberg, and worked for a few months near Heilbronn, plus occasional explorations of Austria and business visits to Vienna, Prague and Bratislava in more recent years. In the second book the only place I have in common with him is Budapest (plus the two towns of Estergom and Szentendre to its north), though he does gaze from across the Danube at the fortress of Golubac, where the photograph I use for my standard user icon was taken.

Also over the course of the narrative, the style of Leigh Fermor's journey shifts - really from about two-thirds of the way through A Time of Gifts, when he finds the knack of staying with local nobility rather than dossing down in barns or police cells, which gives him a much more diverse though frankly aristocratic insight into his surroundings. This is particularly true in the Slovakian and Transylvanian passages, where he tends to end up talking to ethnic Hungarians or members of the other formerly privileged minorities, coming to terms with the new order. Another theme is the gathering historical storm, signalled by his passage through freshly-Nazified Germany and subsequent news bulletins as the situation worsens. He describes cities like Rotterdam and Ulm which would be flattened within a decade.

But there's a sense of maturing as well: the eighteen-year-old fleeing a succession of personal failures in England becomes a keen absorber of local lore and (discreetly described) a lover of local women as he travels. The passage of decades allows Leigh Fermor to poke fun at his younger self occasionally, but also to overlay the narrative with what he has learned since, including occasional updates on what has happened to the principal characters in the story. Much, of course, has changed, and the very last chapter mourns the submerging of much of the Danube valley as a result of the building of the Iron Gates Dam.

Anyway, these are both very highly recommended. ( )

This book isn't nearly as good as time of gifts. The digressions seem more like, well, digressions. Perhaps it is the nature of his voyaging: instead of walking alone, he spends much of the time castle-hopping with aristocrats. Yet it fails to provide that nostalgic, Brideshead Revisited, sense of loss. Fermer's vocabulary is still stunning, but his narrative drags. An afterword getting him to Constantinople would have been nice, too, since he clearly gave up the ghost before doing volume three. ( )