Two Reviews

I’ve been out and about, and I’m coming back with two reviews to make up for my absence. A quick word before I get started about my continued relationship with Central Asia. I mentioned before that I will be pursuing a Masters at Indiana University in Bloomington, and just today I learned that I am being offered an Assistantship through the IAUNRC [Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center]. I’ll accept, and be able to study without adding to my student loans – so today is a good day for Mr. Michael. Without further ado, lets get to the reviews: Shadow of the Silk Road and The Golden Road to Samarkand. You’ll find them after the break.

Shadow of the Silk Road might have benefited from a disclaimer at the front along the lines of that which appears inside the cover of The Golden Road to Samarkand, Wilfrid Blunt’s book of essays written about the “perfectly easy to get to” city of ages in present-day Uzbekistan. Blunt begins with a carefully worded Foreword that attempts to absolve him of all errors of understanding on the part of the reader, claiming both ignorance of the knowledge required to go into depth on Central Asia and his desire to bring knowledge of Central Asia to ‘the masses.’ I’m not quite sure I enjoyed the Foreword Blunt put down, and like the book that follows it seems to compare woefully with anything Colin Thubron wrote in Shadow of the Silk Road, but all the same I appreciate his honesty up front about his own lack of patience with more well-informed works on the region.

The reason I wish Mr. Thubron had written a Foreword is that I never gathered a real sense of whether what he showed me through his text actually happened or not. I almost get the idea that he might suggest it hardly matters how accurately he captured the moments he records – he’s a legend in the travelogue writing genre for taking little but a knapsack, and leaving cameras and other traditional tourist luggage behind. And yet, I can’t help but see his journey as nothing more than tourism – he doesn’t involve himself in people’s lives, doesn’t mention ever solving a problem, offering a solution, or doing more than offering alms to the poor. I don’t expect altruism, except that he seems to give off the air of a connectedness with people that I don’t believe he has earned.

His prose is stunning, at times. He has a poet’s blood in his veins, and can claim the great John Dryden as a direct ancestor. I’ve read other reviews that complain his writing verges on the purple, too verbose and completely leaving his subject matter by the wayside. I understand their complaint, and it adds to the feeling that the many people he interviewed might have thought they were making a friend when they were really only making an impression. Then again, there’s no reason they couldn’t have done both, except for the post-interview judgments Mr. Thubron often lets fly with.

What I enjoyed most about this book was the fact that anyone would actually take the time to travel the Silk Road. Picking the exact route would be at least half the fun, however, and Mr. Thubron never gave reasons for the itinerary he planned. Perhaps it’s not interesting to him, but I would love to find out why he picked each turn at each fork in the road – why not travel through Almaty and the southern borders of Kazakhstan? Why not the spicier underbelly of the Silk Road, closer to India and Pakistan? I assumed that since he was willing to travel through Afghanistan after the American Occupation, he wasn’t overly concerned with amenities, ease of travel, or mine fields. I have to applaud his choice of bookends, traveling from Xian to Antioch, if only because I grew up playing a certain computer game that simulated the great trading families that ruled Venice in the centuries leading up to Columbus’s voyage. Controlling the head of the Silk Road at Antioch meant untold wealth and the possibility of setting up shop in the bazaars of Samarkand, Basra, Calicut, or even Xian itself.

As all of Registan’s readers probably know, the Silk Road would more aptly be called the Silken Web, a vast network of caravan routes across the steppes and deserts of the heart of Asia. The caravanserais weren’t on a single trading route, but more like the rest areas and truck stops one can find across the United States today, waypoints on the interstate expressways connecting East and West. Assuming a single road is similar to simplifying all of American commerce to the I-70 or I-80 corridors, which is even more heinous to my Michigan I-94-loyal soul.

Mr. Thubron and Mr. Blunt both make valiant efforts at encapsulating the history of deepest, darkest Asia, doing no better or worse than any other book on the area. It’s obligatory, and I’m seriously hoping more authors that visit the region will follow Tom Bissell’s God Lives in St. Petersburg example and be able to write about the region without the knee-jerk history lesson of Huns, Mongols, Arabs, & etc. Shadow makes the history more palatable by keeping it geographically topical to the place visited, though this raises and lowers expectations of modern vistas depending on how greatly the history impressed Mr. Thubron. He expects so little of the Uyghurs and so much of the Persian-Iranians, it’s hard not to feel his amazement and disappointment has little to do with reality. The high point of the book is his scaling a cliff face to wonder around Mongol-torched fortresses in Iran, while the lowest points were probably the overly contrived imagined dialogues with a long-diseased Silk Road trader. I understand the use of this literary device, Mr. Thubron trying to pull things together and break up the monotony of travel with introspection and self-reflection… I just don’t think it was necessary, or that it was done well. I would have preferred more realistic conversations with the local population, but it seems that wasn’t possible.

My lasting complaint would be with Mr. Thubron’s overly romanticized remembered conversations with people he interviewed. His Russian is rudimentary at best, and once he leaves China and his Mandarin skills prove useless, the conversations actually seem to deepen and gain meaning. This doesn’t make any sense, though I know from experience the feeling that your “really getting through” to someone and bridging the language gap. However, I also know those feelings are not based in reality, and that questioning the two individuals will bring about totally different impressions of what information was shared. If this weren’t the case, why would we value fluency in another language so highly? If I could really understand Steinbeck with Dr. Seuss-level English, why even bother?

I want to end on a high note, still. Colin Thubron is an excellent writer, and I’ve heard that his earlier travelogues, especially In Siberia, are really second to known and cornerstones of the genre. This book’s failures owe more to the lack of language experience and assumed-familiarity. Mr. Thubron’s eyesight and prose have not fallen off, and when he makes his own observations, claiming them as such and not projecting them into his interviewee’s mouths, he really shines. I hope to read his other work.

As for the other book I’ve read, it wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as Shadow of the Silk Road, except for a couple laugh-out-loud moments at the author’s expense. This goes in line with the Hippy-Girl-in-Poppy-Field and Pig-Skin-Dress-For-My-Muslim-Friends pictures from the earlier posts.

The amount of parenthetical asides in this work almost immediately mark it as unscholarly, full of the author’s own subjective opinions, and not out to educate but to make amusing, interesting, titillating, or at the least, diverting, observations. It’s the quintessential coffee-table book of the English jet-set elite of the 1970s, and even calls itself a Studio Book. Wilfrid Blunt hopes that it will inspire the average reader to set out for Samarkand and Tashkent, “which is now perfectly easy.” Ease of travel must be measured differently now, but the cost has never been easy to master for this average reader. I’ve been working on an idea since passing the age of 25 that maturity might be measured in the frequency of certain words in a person’s vocabulary. There are certain words that raise red flags regarding conclusions and assumptions: everyone, no one, always, never, entirely, absolutely, everywhere, nowhere, etc. I don’t think that these words are bad in and of themselves, but that there’s a tendency to overuse to overstate a weak or informal argument. This book abounds with them:

“Everyone knows that Islam is, and has long been, the dominant religion in Western and most of Central Asia, but it may come as a surprise to many to learn how widely Christianity… in the early centuries of the Christian era. Asia became, in fact, the asylum for the adherents of all those heretical Christian sects… Each sect clung obstinately to its own little heresy.”

This isn’t how I would introduce my readers to the long, rather illustrious history of the Nestorian Christians, Asia’s foremost and most historically successful Christian denomination. Blunt goes on to pass along the history of Mahomet/Muhammad as told by various Christian scholars, making sure to include all the interesting side stories that sound the most comical. Christian history likewise could be filled with the strange beliefs of individual societies regarding Christ’s youth and miraculous life, but would appear just as unprofessional. Religion is always a tricky matter, but if you’re going to write about it, you should be prepared to do so from a distance, which Blunt never intended to do.

“In or about the year 570 there was born in Mecca a child… Mahomet. Abdullah, the infant’s father, was a member of the Koreish tribe and guardian of the Ka’ba (cube) – a shrine enclosing a tribal fetish in the form of a black stone, probably a meteorite; and so dazzling (according to Moslem tradition) were his good looks that on the night of his marriage to Amina, Mahomet’s mother, two hundred inconsolable Koreish virgins committed suicide. ‘The base and plebian origin of Mahomet’, wrote Gibbon, ‘is an unskillful calumny of the Christians, who exalt instead of degrading the merit of their adversary.’

At the moment of his birth… the infant, to put the matter beyond any possible doubt, modestly announced to all present, ‘God is great! There is no God but God, and I am his Prophet’ – the eternal truth and necessary fiction… the foundation-stone of Islam.”

Please, Wilfrid Blunt, tell us what you really think of the Muslims. You’re too ambiguous. He writes the following lines about Babur, descendent of Amir Temur and founder of the Mogul empire.

“Though bisexuality is endemic in the East, there is plenty of evidence to show that Babur was merely passing through a phase of homosexuality common all the world over in adolescence. He always speaks of pederasty with revulsion.”

That might be the cleverest way possible to insinuate that he speaks about pederasty quite a lot.

For those familiar with the tragic tale of Colonel Stoddart and Captain Connolly within the walls of Bukhara, it probably comes as no surprise that Wilfrid Blunt chose to relay their story through the eyes of Dr. Joseph Wolff, the ‘Grand Derveesh of Englistaun,’ the larger-than-life comical character that arrived too late in time to save his pseudo-countrymen from their beheadings before the Ark in Bukhara. Dr. Wolff was born in Germany, and Jewish at that, only to convert to Christianity with the odd ambition to become the Pope. His story is probably the only part of the book that fits Blunt’s style, though it’s sad that Stoddart and Connolly’s tragic fates are offered as little more than interesting footnotes to Dr. Wolff’s travels.

Blunt’s treatment of Central Asian culture and history is neither complete, unbiased, or free of contemptuous jokes at his subject’s expense. He refers jokingly in his Epilogue to the “great pioneer days of Asian aviation,” meaning flying carpets, Mahomet’s heavenly ascension, and other mythical contraptions. I’ll close this review with his words:

“A part of what I now write, a fortnight after my return from Samarkand, will probably be out of date almost before the ink is dry on the paper, because each day ‘progress’ is cutting out more and more of the picturesque but insanitary canker of the old city and replacing it by Western-style buildings… no one, whatever his political views, can visit Russia today without marveling at the Soviet economic miracle… so I suppose that one is selfish in wishing that Samarkand had been treated more tenderly, that the new town had not been allowed to burst its banks and overwhelm the picturesque, unpractical, unsalubrious capital of Tamerlane.”

This post was written by...

Michael Hancock-Parmer – author of 158 posts on Registan.net.

Michael earned an MA in Central Eurasian Studies in 2011 and remains a student at Indiana University pursuing a dual PhD in Russian History and Central Eurasian Studies. He served 6 months in the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan in 2005. After the events in Andijan and the subsequent closure of the program, he served 2 years in southern Kazakhstan, returning to the Midwest in 2007. His general area of interest is on post-Timur Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, centered on the Syr Darya river valley.

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