The Places In Between
by Rory Stewart
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Book Reviews of The Places In Between
Book Review: More about "the places" than the "in betweens"
Summary: 4 Stars
Some things don't require explanation. People just do things, perhaps on impulse or some hidden private passion. But partaking in something as daring as walking for twenty months on foot through potentially dangerous territory would, it seems, necessitate some fundamental reason for doing so. But maybe not? In any case, Scottish journalist explorer turned Parliamentary candidate Rory Stewart set out on such a journey in 2001. His bipedal voyage was chronicled in "The Places In Between," which was hailed as a masterpiece and has helped put Stewart into the Academic (he now holds a chair at Harvard) and political spotlight (he is campaigning as a Conservative Party MP). Maybe his walk was inspired merely by the desire to "be somebody?" A sort of distinguishing for the marketplace? Whatever the reasoning behind it, the book's first line provides no illumination: "I'm not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan. Perhaps I did it because it was an adventure." He was thankfully good enough at explaining it to Afghans who allowed him to trudge through their volatile war-torn country. Stewart told them that he's retracing the steps of the 16th century Mughal Emperor Babur, that he's writing a book, that he's a history professor, he basically told them whatever he needed to tell them to maintain his quest. Sometimes, and he admits this openly, he lied to secure lodging or to avoid threats. One salient feature about his journey is the amount of tall tales told by Stewart and his companions along the way. One of Stewart's guides tells suspicious visitors that he is an American, and that his metal tipped walking stick can summon American helicopters at a moment's notice. They subsequently leave him alone. At another time a guide tells a host that Stewart is a doctor. More than once Stewart claims that he's an important personal friend of such and such powerful person, which allows him to scramble out of some tough spots. He wisely dodges some questions about his belief in Islam, but when pushed he gives a very Islamic interpretation of Christianity to questioners. This method never gets him in trouble. So apparently a fair amount of truth bending is required for a foreigner to pass through Afghanistan. This isn't surprising considering the state of that country.
Those seeking an ultimate reason for Stewart's journey may remain frustrated throughout the book. They will nonetheless encounter a highly charged and very readable narrative of what must have been a harrowing and perspective-building experience. The trip starts at Herat in western Afghanistan and grinds slowly through rough terrain all the way to Kabul to the far east. Along the way Stewart encounters the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. He meets very few women, veiled or unveiled, and their sighting provides a litmus test for the tolerance of a region. Once he enters a room to see women fly into the shadows. He receives some of the best treatment in places where women appear openly in public. On the last leg of his journey, in Al-Qaeda and Taliban territory, he gets punched in the face and threatened with physical violence. Some amazing landmarks also appear, such as the mysterious Minaret at Jam. He falls down its spiral staircase. People at Jam tell him about excavations, mostly mercenary, in the hills surrounding the minaret. They find antiquities which lead them to believe that Jam was the legendary "Turquoise Mountain." In Chist-e_Sharif he sees the famous hollowed out domes. And at Bamiyan he sees the empty mountain crevices that once held the enormous Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban. Those sites alone were probably worth the trip. In Dahan-e-Rezak he is given a maltreated dog he names Babur and who accompanies him until sickness prompts Stewart to ask Doctors Without Borders officials to drive Babur to Kabul. Stewart eventually catches up with him, but Babur's fate remains uncertain until the epilogue. The walk ends in ravaged Kabul where a local, mistaking him for an Arab, warns him that he just can't walk into Kabul "there are British and American soldiers ahead." He meets up with a well fed Babur in Kabul.
Though "The Places in Between" provides for great travel writing, it does not present a complete or even clear picture of Afghanistan or its people. The book is really about the author's journey. True, those who know nothing about the country will pick up some interesting tidbits, but this isn't an anthropology or an in-depth study in any sense of the word. It's a travelogue, and a highly entertaining one. Those looking for detailed analysis of Afghanistan should look elsewhere. Though he meets many interesting people, Stewart does not see or speak with enough people to consider his story representative of Afghanistan. He spends most of his time walking in unpopulated areas. Also, Stewart himself does not really emerge from the narrative. His focus remains on telling the story of the journey, not on personal introspection, though some of this does appear in smatterings. This somewhat belies the title, which evokes uninhabited landscapes where Stewart did in fact spend most of his time. But ultimately, the book spends more time on "the places" than on the "in betweens." Still, anyone looking for an intriguing story about a lone person in unknown territory will find a good read here. And perhaps we'll hear more about Stewart if he wins the Parliamentary seat and maybe someday he'll either figure out or reveal why he set out on this Quixotic quest.
Book Review: Walking To Enlightenment
Summary: 5 Stars
Serendipitously, I finished Rudyard Kipling's masterpiece, KIM, on the same day I read the NY TIMES review of Rory Stewart's THE PLACES IN BETWEEN, a review that was so compelling that I bought the book that very Sunday.
Serendipitous because there are many remarkable resonances between Stewart's narrative of his walk from Herat to Kabul in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion in 2002 and Kim O'Hara's fictional walk along India's Grand Trunk Road during the period circa 1900 known as The Great Game -- the struggle between Britain and Russia for control of Central Asia.
In both works we find the omnipresent influence of religion upon the social and political spheres. Interestingly, in KIM, Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists of many sects mingle with one another inside the discipline of an ancient feudal caste system, (a system the British adroitly exploited for economic gain). By Stewart's time, however, the Taliban's religious fundamentalism has violently undone the tradition of tolerance and hospitality.
Then, on a more mundane level, in both works, we encounter civilizations where distance is calibrated by a day's journey on foot. Both "characters" walk ancient routes dotted with caravanserai, roadside inns where travelers could rest and recover from the day's journey. In Stewart's case, these shelters are mostly abandoned; it is often the mosque that is now the way station. In Kim's world, the shelters and markets are teeming with travelers from far away places who trade stories, foods, goods, songs, jokes, and often hilarious verbal abuse. That Stewart is told by Afghani officials he will likely be killed during his walk is indicative of how much this ancient culture has changed.
In an arresting footnote (pgs. 247-248), Stewart, after reading a post-war development plan for Afghanistan when he arrives in Kabul, remarks that "Critics have accused this new brand of administrators of neo-colonialism," then goes on to say "Colonial administrators may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing."
That is certainly the case of the British in India as described by Kipling in KIM. Kim himself simultaneously takes up the roles of spy for the British and novice to a Tibetan Buddhist lama. Kim can dutifully attend a Catholic school for children of colonial officers where he becomes a skilled surveyor, then during vacations disappear into India's teeming masses of beggars, holy men, and traders -- the familiar life he grew up in as the orphan of a British soldier. In this, he is a perfect instrument of both British military intelligence, and, ironically, the questing Chinese lama whom he guides through the rough and tumble world of street thieves, beggars and mountebanks to a prophesied river of forgiveness and enlightenment.
The new neo-colonialists, Stewart suggests, have one plan for every developing country, a plan that is based on a modern "fundamentalism" -- the infallibility of the Free Market. And when this ideology fails, Stewart notes, as it has failed in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the new neo-colonialist administrators pack up their bags and move on to the next international hotspot, touting the same panacea despite its repeated failure to take hold. This kind of failure would never have been tolerated among earlier colonial empires; it may be emblematic of America's schizophrenic, impatient, inconsistent brand of imperialism.
In THE PLACES IN BETWEEN we see the vestiges of an ancient civilization, its passing hurried by the new version of The Great Game which demands adherence to the universalist creed of economic freedom. Common human decency, once supported by the strictures of Islam that demanded among its followers hospitality to strangers, is fading fast as the project for a new American century polarizes and radicalizes traditional cultures everywhere.
Whether you read it as an adventure, a travelogue, a guide to what's happened and what's happening in Afghanistan, THE PLACES IN BETWEEN is truly a remarkable achievement.
Book Review: Stranger in a Strange Land
Summary: 5 Stars
"I am not good at explaining why I walked across Afghanistan." Thus starts an attempt of explanation by Rory Stewart in _The Places in Between_ (Harcourt), an entertaining account of his jaunt through a strange and dangerous place. A member of the newly re-formed Afghan Security Service tells him beforehand: "You are the first tourist in Afghanistan. It is mid-winter. There are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves, and this is a war. You will die, I guarantee." It was all good advice, and it turned out that the warnings were sensible although futile, and the prediction of doom turned out to be incorrect. Stewart traveled in January 2002, weeks after the fall of the Taliban, 36 days on foot, about five hundred miles across Afghanistan's belt from Herat to Kabul, writing in his notebook at night, and drawing sketches of people and places he had seen. The trek doesn't make any real sense, the country has been ravaged by war, there are still insane Taliban goons, and yet the result is a wise and funny book to let us know how incredibly different this section of the world is from anywhere the rest of us have experienced.
Stewart is a Scottish journalist who has served in the British Army and the Foreign Office. He spoke Dari, the Afghan dialect of Persian, which he had learned in Iran. In fact, his Afghanistan walk is a belated link in his walk across Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal. He did not have a detailed map "... because I did not want to be thought a spy." He did have an almost constant companion, a "war dog" bought in the village of Dahan-e-Rezak. The dog was a mastiff, the size of a small pony, and as Stewart propels himself along his journey, the relationship with the dog is the most long-lasting one he describes. He finds that villages generally accept the changes that world clashes have forced upon them, but is amazed at how little they have to go on. "Most of the people in this area had not heard of Britain, though they had heard of America. Some had even heard of the World Trade Center; but they had no real concept of what it had been or why the coalition had bombed Afghanistan." The Afghans are bemused by Stewart's pedestrian ambitions. When he asks where he can buy a walking stick, he is told, "Nowhere here. Stewart, in return, has much to puzzle about. One night, villagers turned on the BBC Dari service, and listened intently to a translation of a speech by Bill Gates. "I wondered what these illiterate men without electricity thought of bundling Internet Explorer with Windows." His scariest brush with locals was with Taliban, hanging on in one sector: "The men struck me as bullies with a strangled and dangerous view of God and a stupid obsession with death. I did not envy the government that had to deal with them."
Finally he approaches Kabul, but is warned by a stranger, "Get off the road. This is much too dangerous for you. There are British and American soldiers ahead." Stewart assures him he won't get hurt, and the man unconsciously pays him a great compliment: "But you're an Arab, aren't you?" Weeks of hard travel, poor food, and illness (he wondered at one point if he were going to die of dysentery) had enabled him to blend right in. He was roughly treated at times during his journey, but dedicates with gratitude his book to those "who showed me the way, fed me, protected me, housed me, and made this walk possible." He essentially thanks them for not killing him, which is damning with faint praise: "I represented a culture that many of them hated," but almost every group he met "gave me hospitality without any thought of reward." The hospitality, a Muslim tradition that cannot be denied a traveler, is often pretty bad. At one house, the master is too busy praying to speak to his guest, but sends around "soup made from rotten meat which I could not stomach, and bread." In the guest room at a castle, he shivered: "It was as cold as any Scottish castle." By the end of his travels, though, it is clear that Stewart has affection for those he has visited, citizens of a mystifying land now tightly bound in to our own.
Book Review: Maybe He Shouldn't Have...
Summary: 1 Stars
The Places in Between by Rory Stewart was given to me for Christmas because it was listed as one of the NY Times top 10 books for 2006. I think maybe it was listed as such because of cronyism. Rory Stewart has written for the NY Times magazine.
Rory Stewart "walked every step of the way" across Iran, Pakistan, India, Nepal and Afghanistan for 20 months beginning in 2000. He's not sure why he did all this " maybe because it was an adventure". It was most definitely a book, albeit a not very good one. His main motif was interposing excerpts from the diary of Babur, the 15th century Indian Mughul dynasty emperor, who did the same thing before he became emperor. Maybe Rory Stewart wants to become an emperor. At least he's a wannabe Babur. Here's what he says about the original:
"He (Babur) tells this adventure story with impressive modesty. What he did was very dangerous but he never draws attention to this. INSTEAD HE FOCUSES ON THE PEOPLE HE MEETS AND USES PORTRAITS OF INDIVIDUALS TO SUGGEST A WHOLE SOCIETY. He pays more attention to his contemporary world than to legends or ancient history and he is a careful observer.... He does not embroider anecdotes to make them neater, funnier, more personal or more symbolic. Unlike most travel writers he is honest...At times it seems like the only thing missing from the story is himself. HE NEVER EXPLAINS WHAT DRIVES HIM TO LIVE THIS EXTRAORDINARY LIFE AND TAKE THESE KINDS OF RISKS. HE DOES NOT DESCRIBE HIS EMOTIONS AND AS A RESULT CAN SEEM DISTANT AND THE EPISODES OF HIS LIFE REPETITIVE. Confronted by dead bodies or people trying to kill him, he writes in increasingly dispassionate and impersonal prose. But his restraint only emphasizes the extraordinary nature of his experiences."
I capitalized the sentences that ring true about Rory. He doesn't describe his emotions but he does make sure to repeatedly tell us how sick he is most of the journey. He sees the landscape as exceedingly bleak and the majority of the people as suspicious or hostile or at least don't live up to their reputation as gracious hosts. There is a cultural expectation that one always has room and a meal for a stranger. That's probably how Rory figured out he could do this journey in the first place, but half the time the meal is a bit of bread (it may or may not be all they have) and the room is in a mosque because no one can or will have him in their home. He dedicated the book to " all the people who fed me, protected me, housed me, and made this walk possible" but in fact, he seemed like a nuisance and an interloper and one senses a sigh of relief on the part of his hosts when he moves on to the next town.
He does pick up a companion, an abused Afghan "war dog" which he names Babur. The dog has never left his village but Rory takes him away with him and dreams of taking him home to Scotland. Once he joins Rory we have repeated descriptions of Babur being drug along every day and he ends up being too sore and weak to complete the journey and is sent ahead with the help of some MSFers. At the conclusion of the journey, while waiting to be shipped to the UK, ultimate misfortune visits Babur.
Only at the end of the book, as he completes his journey and before the epilogue describing the return to Scotland, does Rory start " to smell the roses". Mostly, it was just a long and weary road and it was a long and wearying book.
Book Review: A snapshot of Afghanistan in 2001
Summary: 3 Stars
I read this book right after having seen "Charlie Wilson's War", so the impact on my knowledge of Afghanistan is probably influenced by the light and ironic interpretation of the movie.
Rory Stewart a journalist and former fellow of the Carr Center for Human Right's Policy has written a diary of his one month journey on foot through Afghanistan.
The many reviews and the apparently great fortune of this book rely on it's subject, Afghanistan, it's timing, right after 9/11, the way the Author traveled, rigorously by foot with the company of a dog.
Let's start from the end. Traveling by foot or trekking is the most primitive and essential type of travel that unites the detailed coverage of the territory (how can we know something better than having walked it down) to the pure joy and hypnotic exercise of walking. Only true walkers can understand this feeling. Rory Stewart is apparently a great walker and in his book he underlines the importance of the way he traveled in many occasions, reversing Machiavelli's "the end justifies the means" with "the means justifies the end". The timing: after 9/11 and the fall of the Taliban was a dangerous and apparently insanely chosen moment, but in reality the displacement of the pre-existing equilibrium consented a "free window" to the penetration of the soul and the soil of the country. The subject: Afghanistan is one of the last places on earth each of us would travel through but at the same time it is the focal point of world politics, the tail of the cold war between Russia and America, the cradle of Islamic integralism that is shattering our deepest national securities (and here I'm talking not only of the US but also of Europe).
The company of a dog named Babur after the emperor that traveled the same route in the Fifteenth Century touches the heart strings of many animal lovers and consent s a digression in the monotony of the trip.
The Author has well studied his travelogue technique and it would be unthinkable that a young Scottsman hadn't read Kipling, Robert Byron, Darlrymple, Newby, Chatwin, Thubron and other English travelers that have visited the same country. From these Authors he draws his well oiled writing technique that guaranties the immediate and enjoyable readability of I repeat a monotonous journey.
The idea of following a previous historical traveler, that in this case is the emperor Babur is not new and the excerpta from the Barburnama are a little to long and sometimes do not make a point.
All together subject, timing, trekking, company and writing technique make an interesting book that appears like a snapshot in time of the unfortunate country of Afghanistan. However we never really manage to touch the soul of the Author or of the country he visited. Its only through the plethora of people and situations described that we can build an idea of the Afghan reality. This unemotional description of reality is probably modern and scientific but leaves me hungering for a more participating traveling companion.
This book was published in fortunate circumstances and this I think is one of the reasons for its great success, but I think it will not stand the test of time or become a classic of travel literature.