Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana (1937)

An account in diary format of a trip through Persia (Iran) and Afghanistan that Byron made in 1933, primarily to examine the architecture of medieval monuments and places of worship.

I found enthusiastic references to this author and his works in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Broken Road and Marius Kociejowski’s A Factotum in the Book Trade. The American writer Paul Fussell said The Road to Oxiana was to travel literature what The Wasteland was to poetry and Ulysses to fiction. Needless to say, I came to the book with high expectations. I didn’t find Byron as personable and engaging an author as Fermor, or his book as compelling as Fermor’s A Time of Gifts. It’s not just that I have little interest in the Middle Eastern architecture that fascinated Byron but that he seems to make a conscious effort to keep his distance from the reader.

When I finished with the book, two passages stuck in memory as particularly revealing of Byron’s stance as an author. They can serve as summaries of what I liked and didn’t like about the text. The first illustrates his extraordinary powers of observation and description. All his life he was fascinated by colour, in this case, the colour green.

Suddenly, as a ship leaves the estuary, we came out onto the steppe: a dazzling open sea of green. I never saw that colour before. In other greens, of emerald, jade, or malachite, the harsh deep green of the Bengal jungle, the sad cool green of Ireland, the salad green of Mediterranean vineyards, the heavy full-blown green of English beeches, some element of blue or yellow predominates over the others. This was the pure essence of green, indissoluble, the colour of life itself.

The second passage reveals the author’s inbred snobbism, which had the effect of reducing most of the people he met on his journey (even fellow-Europeans) to membership in an inferior race. The passage begins with his travel companion, the writer Christopher Sykes, trying to cook breakfast in a small Afghan village. For their own protection and to keep them from visiting restricted areas, Byron and Sykes were accompanied, at this stage in their journey, by two Afghani soldiers, whom they nicknamed the Vicar and the Curate.

This morning at Bamian, Christopher was scrambling eggs with his dagger when the fire gave out, and he asked the Curate to fetch more wood. He asked again. He then prodded the man with the dagger. Now at Shibar the Vicar and he wanted to share our room. We said it was not big enough. Unused to such treatment, the Curate gave us a lecture. No doubt, he said, we had our own Frankish customs. But in Afghanistan, he begged us to realize, everything depended on friendship. If he did things for us, it was because we were his friends, not because we told him to do them. He was a guard in government employ, not our servant. For the rest of the journey he hoped we should be good friends, so that he could do things for us. And so on.

It is not our fault we have no servant. We have tried to engage one at every town since Herat, and in each case have been told by the authorities that the guards they supplied would act as servants. Thus in bullying the Curate we have only taken the authorities at their word. Nevertheless, his speech abashed us.

The distance that exists between Byron and those whom he would make into his servants is the same distance that exists between him and his reader. It is a gulf he creates out of a sense of distrust and of impatience that borders on contempt. The consequence is that with Byron, there is a tendency to bully rather than befriend the reader. In contrast, it is virtually impossible to imagine Paddie Fermor refusing to share his room with a travelling companion. His generosity of spirit is one of the qualities that makes him a finer writer than Byron.