The Places in Between

This is book nine on my quest to read the New York Times Book Review 10 Best of 2007, and concludes the non-fiction half. The Places in Between is Rory Stewart's account of how, in January 2002, just weeks after coalition forces had driven the Taliban from power, he walked across Afghanistan, from Herat to Kabul. Certainly this was an enterprise that most right-thinking people would never dream of attempting.

Stewart, a Scotsman who speaks Arabic and Persian (including Dari, a dialect of Persian spoken in much of Afghanistan), is an expert on the history of the region. He had already walked across much of Asia, through Nepal, India, Pakistan and Iran. Afghanistan was the missing piece of the puzzle. He wanted to follow in the footsteps of Babur, the sixteenth-century Indian Moghul. Problems: he is doing it in winter, through mountains where drifts of snow can get to be nine feet deep. There are many wolves. The political situation is tempestuous, at best. "You will certainly die," he is told by an official at the beginning of the book. Yet he has an unshakable desire to do this, in the great tradition of others from the island of Great Britain, including one who said, "Because it is there."

This is a tantalizing subject for a book, but I must say I was a bit underwhelmed. Of course, reading a book because it is on a best 10 list sets one up for disappointment. I didn't think it was bad or uninteresting, but it didn't exactly sweep me into a state of intoxication. Stewart's writing style is very terse and unemotional. We don't learn much about him, only that he is driven by some inner demon to do this thing, and by his own terms (at one point he takes a short ride in a truck over a river, but then goes back to retrace it so he can say he walked the whole thing). He is pretty much agnostic about the politics. I read elsewhere that he once worked for the British field office, but there is no jingoism in his writing. He is very respectful of the history, landscape, and people he meets, but not in a golly-gee way.

What we get instead is something of a journal of visits to one mud-hut after another. The chapters are very short, some only a page or two, which contributes to a chopped up feeling. For the first week or so he is accompanied by three men assigned to him by the government, and we get to know them as characters and get some insight into what it's like to be an Afghan in that time period. But Stewart wants to travel alone, and eventually does, and when he arrives at village after village the circumstances seem to blend into one. Some villagers are kind to him, others are threatening, but unless one has a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of Afghan terrain, it's difficult to put the whole thing in context.

About half way through his journey Stewart is given a retired fighting dog, a mastiff-wolf hybrid who he names Babur. The story then becomes dangerously close to one of those books about a guy and his dog, and tugs a little more at the heartstrings (it's interesting to note that Stewart talks about how the plight of a lion in the Kabul zoo raised more money than the plight of its human citizens).

In summing up, this book is an interesting, fairly brief read, but I can't join the chorus of hosannas that hail it as a classic. I think an evening at a pub with Stewart, hearing about his trip, might be far more enthralling.