The Broken Road: A Time Of Gifts Part 3

Every month or so for the past 10 years I've been checking Amazon and Booklist to see when Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time Of Gifts: Part 3 is coming out. When Leigh Fermor died in 2011 without finishing the book I despaired but then I began to hear rumours that actually the ms. was near completion and his publishers, the venerable John Murray, were putting the book together from this ms. and Fermor's notes. Yesterday my internet persistence paid off and with a great deal of exictement I saw on Amazon.co.uk, a listing that has appeared for TOG Pt3 to be called The Broken Road. The first part A Time Of Gifts was published in 1977, the follow up volume, Between The Woods And The Water, 10 years later so this has been the longest wait of all, but since Fermor is no longer with us we're lucky to have the book in any form. 
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Patrick Leigh Fermor was a war hero, a bon vivant, a wit, a polyglot, a belle lettrist, an impeccable prose stylist and, possibly, the last of the great English travel writers. In 1933 at the age of 19 after failing to get into university Leigh Fermor decided to travel on foot from London to Constantinople. He caught the ferry to Holland and began an epic journey, the first part of which he chronicled in A Time of Gifts. After making it to Constantinople he fell in love with Greece and travelled there until war broke out. He joined the SOE and worked behind enemy lines in Crete. His exploits as a commando were later made into the Michael Powell film Ill Met By Moonlight.
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Patrick Leigh Fermor is the man as far as I'm concerned. He loved languages, travel, scholarship, cultural differences and most of all people. He never accepted the surface judgement on anything or anyone and preferred to investigate things for himself. He had a keen eye for the country, for buildings and human beings. There's a new biography of Fermor by Artemis Cooper out now and if the name is unfamiliar to you, you can read the excellent Daily Telegraph obituary here.  If you haven't had a chance to read A Time of Gifts yet consider yourself lucky - you are in for a real treat. 

The Journey is its Own Reward

A genre I've always enjoyed is travel writing. I've never been tempted to do a travel book myself because I don't really like talking to strangers on trains or making copious notes about my trips - two things that are essential if you want to be the next Paul Theroux. My favourite travel writers include: Mark Twain, Norman Lewis, Rudyard Kipling, Eric Newby, Robert Byron, Paul Theroux, Peter Matthiessen, Evelyn Waugh, Jan Morris, Graham Greene, Freya Stark, Jonathan Raban, Robyn Davidson et. al. But my two all time favourite travel books are The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry Garrard and A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor. I'll blog about Cherry-Garrard another time but since he's still with us I thought I'd talk here about Fermor. In 1933 Paddy Fermor was 18 years old and washed up, he'd been expelled from school and couldn't get into university or the army and had no idea what to do with his life. So without speaking any modern European language (of course he was proficient in Latin and ancient Greek) he decided to walk from London to Constantinople. A Time of Gifts is the story of that trip, or at least the first third of it, being an account of his wanderings across newly Nazified Germany and into Austria and Hungary. Fermor began the book forty years after he took the journey and it gave him a lot of time to ruminate and contemplate the meaning of his wanderings, and, like a fine Bowmore single malt, 40 years maturation obviously leads to perfection. A Time of Gifts is a wonderful book filled with a young man's enthusiasm and an older man's wisdom. It's packed with beautiful descriptions, funny incidents and thoughtful commentary on the people and places he encounters. Much to his embarrassment young and older women seem to fallen in love with Fermor left and right and he had a knack for falling in love himself as well the ability to pick up German, Hungarian, Romanian and Greek.
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After his Constantinople journey Fermor moved to Greece and he was there when WW2 broke out. The British recruited him to be a secret agent operating behind enemy lines in Nazi occupied Crete, where, somewhat incredibly, his small band of fighters managed to capture the German general in charge of the entire island - a tale which was told in the book and film Ill Met by Moonlight. After the war Leigh Fermor travelled in the Americas and spent time in Greek Orthodox monastic retreats. There's a great interview with Fermor in the May 2003 Paris Review which isn't available online and a nice New Yorker piece here which unfortunately requires registration to read the full thing.