The Broken Road

I snapped up the third volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor's travel memoir, The Broken Road, when it appeared on Brotherhood Books, though I have yet to read the middle book, Between Woods and Water. The three volumes recall a long trip made by Leigh Fermor on foot across Europe to Constantinople (as it was in the mid-1930s), at the age of eighteen-nineteen/twenty. It's quite a shock when he celebrates his twentieth birthday at the end of The Broken Road and you're reminded just how young he was when he made this great trek, carrying just a rucksack on his back, a few letters of introduction, and relying on the arrival of cash at the next Poste Restante. This volume traces his wanderings through Bulgaria and Romania, ending with a sojourn at Mount Athos in Greece.

Young Patrick enjoyed a lot of advantages in making this journey -- he's confident, fit, posh (or at least well-connected, and able to sometimes stay with ambassadors and the relatives of posh friends). He picks up different languages with incredible ease. He's attractive and charming, well able to talk his way into a bed for the night, whether that's with a casual acquaintance met in a local bar or a shepherd whose hut he's come upon in the middle of a rainy night. His self-confidence is stunning; it's impossible to imagine a young woman of the same age being able to undertake a similar trip, which is not to say that his long walk is without danger, because he sometimes skates perilously close to trouble. Am I jealous? Maybe a bit.

Leigh Fermor's writing is, however, equally stunning. He sketches brilliantly vivid word-pictures, so you feel you're walking beside him and experiencing exactly what he sees. His memory is extraordinary, even in this final volume where he admits there are gaps and blurs in his recollection. Of course he is also often relying on the diary he kept at the time, and the very final section, about his time on Mount Athos, consists of extracts from that diary. I wish I could have written something so lucid, so piercingly observant and erudite, when I was twenty (or now, come to that). Patrick Leigh Fermor's writing is a treat, a journey to be savoured slowly and every moment relished.