Saturday, September 07, 2013

The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos by Patrick Leigh Fermor – review

After seven decades, no one expected to see the great traveller finally complete his masterwork with the last part of his trilogy

Mount Athos
Simonopetra Monastery, on Mount Athos, also known as the Holy Mountain. Photograph: Dimitris Sotiropoulos Photography/Getty Images/Flickr RF

After a lifetime of travel, Patrick Leigh Fermor made his last journey in June 2011. Under a cloudy, grey English sky, his bier was carried out of the church at Dumbleton, in the Cotswolds, towards the waiting grave
    It was in some ways almost a military funeral: the coffin was shrouded in a union flag, a military piper sounded "The Flowers of the Forest", and the wooden coffin was slowly lowered by six grey-haired veterans in uniform. Then the last post was played by a bugler in a bearskin.

    Yet the readings that had preceded the burial came from a very different, more literary world. One was from the apocryphal Book of James, describing a moment when time stands still; another was an arcane passage from The Garden of Cyrus by the Restoration mystic Sir Thomas Browne: "But the Quincunx of Heaven runs low, and 'tis time to close the five ports of knowledge."

    In death, as in life, Leigh Fermor was a master of bringing together different worlds that one would normally have imagined to be opposed, if not incompatible. A one-man compendium of contradictions, Paddy (as he was known to everyone) was a genuine war hero. He abducted the German commandant of Crete, and in the movie of the exploit, Ill Met By Moonlight, Paddy was played by Dirk Bogarde. Yet this man of action, with the speech patterns, polished brogues and perfect manners of a prewar British major, was also one of the great masters of English prose.

    Paddy was equally at home with both high and low living. His masterpiece, A Time of Gifts, the first volume of a trilogy, tells of his walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in the last days of prewar Europe, "like a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar", as he moved from dosshouses to Danubian ducal fortresses: "There is much to recommend moving straight from straw to a four-poster," he wrote, "and then back again."
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    1 comment:

    Kevin Faulkner said...

    Not so much an arcane passage as simply Sir T.B. stating it's late and time for sleep !