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Patrick Leigh Fermor is considered one of the greatest living travel writers in the world (according to the Daily Telegraph), yet I had not heard of the 93-year-old until last year when a colleague recommended these two books as must-read classics. He was right.
At the age of 18, the boy whose headmaster reported as having "a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness" was expelled from school for holding the hand of the greengrocer's daughter. Unqualified and uncertain about a career, Leigh Fermor decided to abandon England "and set out across Europe like a tramp".
Armed with £50 and a rucksack full of notebooks, pencils, the Oxford Book of English Verse and the verses of Horace, Leigh Fermor set off in late 1933, just as Hitler's shadow was darkening over Europe. He took a steamer across the English Channel to dark, snow-covered Rotterdam, which "completed the illusion that I was slipping ... into Europe, through a secret door".
The walk, which ended in January 1935, had started. These two books, although not written until many years later, are enchanting, not only for the minutely detailed descriptions of people and place, many of which have been destroyed by war and "progress", but for the rhythm of Leigh Fermor's extremely dense prose.
Some critics have called his style an "incantational love of great waterfalls of words"; others accuse him of the most vivid purple prose. I find his writing amazingly visual, especially as he goes eastward into truly alien territory.
Early in the first book, he wanders through "Rhineland", and can't help but notice the influence of Hitler and his thugs, who had come to power 10 months earlier. He found "the prevailing mood was a bewildered acquiescence.
Occasionally it rose to fanaticism ... the rumours of the concentration camps were still no louder than a murmur; but they hinted at countless unavowable tragedies." As Leigh Fermor winds along the Rhine and the Danube, he is travelling among the lands of baroque castles and kingdoms past.
Too quickly, he runs out of money and relies on kind strangers who offer an apple, a cake, a bed for the night. The occasional envelopes from his father, stuffed with a fiver, keep him going.
A Time of Gifts ends as Leigh Fermor is about to cross from Slovakia into Hungary. Between the Woods and the Water takes up the tale as he crosses the Hungarian Plains - not walking, but riding on a borrowed horse called Malek. He stays with gypsies and a brown dancing bear, then on to the bizarre mysteries of Transylvania, and eventually the muezzin calls of Constantinople.
After this journey ends, he went on to Greece, where he fell in love - and learned the language fluently. When war came, Leigh Fermor's linguistic skills led the way to a dashing career as a commando in Crete, disguised as a shepherd living in caves. At the age of 25, he and his small team kidnapped the German commander on the island to try and to raise morale, a sequence of events later made into the film Ill Met By Daylight, in which Dirk Bogarde played Leigh Fermor.
Apparently the general lay on the ground smoking and mumuring a few lines from Horace in Latin. When he stopped, Leigh Fermor continued. Leigh Fermor has published other highly regarded travel books, notably Mani and Roumeli, both odes to Greece.
A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water were first published in 1977 and 1986 as part of what was supposed to be a trilogy. Leigh Fermor, who lives in Mani in southern Greece, is said to have almost completed the third. I'd recommend the first two to anyone who enjoys a challenge in their "travel reading". The books are so much more than those feeble two words can convey.
A Time of Gifts Between the Woods and the Water
by Patrick Leigh Fermor (John Murray $29.99)
* New editions of Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and Water are being released in limited stock mid-February; they can be ordered from book stores or via Amazon.
