Customer Reviews

Montenegro

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The story of Auberon Harwell's gradual involvement with a country to which he is a stanger proves that fiction can be and, in this case, is, a metaphor for history. It is also a very timely novel, for the pre World War I Austria which he describes can be seen as an echo of the current Western debate surrounding the former Yugoslavia. Also, Lawrence gives a balanced historical context for understanding the soul, character and motivation of the Serbs. His lyrical prose captures the essence of the land and the ties of the people to that land in such a way that we can begin to understand the deep nature of the complexities of geopolitical motivations. Also, as the daughter of a Montenegrin exile, this book brought me closer to my own father's story and my own history. Who should we send to mediate the "Balkan problem"? Starling Lawrence!

I found this book to be more of an exploration of the feelings of the Englishman than of politics. It told me nothing that I didn't already know about the history of the area. I strongly recommend not reading the first chapter first; read the rest of the book, then go back and read the first chapter. The first chapter is essentially a summary of the whole book, and you will know what will happen and how it will end before you read the book itself.

One of the best book I've read this year. Couldn't put it down; just had to know the end.Great writing.

What Auberon Harwell's Montenegrin odyssey does best of all is introduce the fortunate reader to the convolutions of Balkan politics, circa 1908 (or 1992 or 1998). History resonates deeply thoughout Harwell's encounters with the variety of Balkan types. After a few pithy exchanges like, "Where is Serbia?" "Whereever Serbians live," contemporary events begin to drop clearly into place. Rich characterizations, authentic locales and landscapes, dense, almost anthropological observations, and the most chaste of romantic entanglements make this a rewarding, agreeably languorous, novel.

Occasionally, when I read a book, the hype is such that I expect more than I get. This book is billed as a literate spy novel about a British adventurer, young and naive, who gets caught up in the intrigues of the Balkan peninsula during the period just prior to WW1. It turns out to be much less than that, and in a way more. The fact that it doesn't live up to its promise was something of a dissappointment to me, and it was only partly offset by what the book was instead.

Auberon Harwell journeys to Montenegro at the behest of the murky Lord Polgrove, to do something intelligence-wise. We're never sure what Harwell is there for, other than his half-make-believe cover story of collecting flowers for his sponsor. He doesn't seem sure what he's doing either, and muddles around aimlessly for half the book before he begins to actually do things that impact the plot in any way. When he finally gets to some action, the author turns what was supposed to be a spy novel into a tragedy involving a mother's love for her son, and the consequences that flow from that. There is finally some adventure towards the end of the book, and the plot does begin to speed up. It was too late for me, however, to enjoy the book. In the last thirty pages, the book takes some strange turns, and frankly it sounded like he got tired of writing.

Some of the prose is quite eloquent. The question is whether eloquent prose in service a plot that's much ado about nothing. I, frankly, think that the story's the important thing, unless the prose is truly memorable. For me, the book didn't measure up that way.

One of the strengths of Starling Lawrence's "Montenegro" is the care with which the author captures the stern, austere, rock-strewn beauty of that small country in the Balkans. Anyone who has driven the road from Kotor to the country's former capital of Cetinje, and has taken a car up Mount Lovcen with its 27 switchbacks. will appreciate the accuracy of Lawrence's descriptions of the Montenegrin landscape. Set in the years before World War I, "Montenegro" mixes foreign intrigue, war, romance, espionage, and all sorts of physical danger and privation. The novel's protagonist, Auberon Harwell, is an Englishman who is officially traveling in the Balkans as a botanist in search of rare specimens; in fact, however, he has been sent into Montenegro as a sort of amateur spy. His employer, a supercilious British lord, hopes to benefit politically from the tension among Serbs, Turks, and Austrians in that hotly contested part of the world. Lawrence captures well the manner in which Balkan life can combine pastoral beauty and hideous violence. He also does well at interweaving two love stories -- one between Harwell and Lydia Wadham, an Englishwoman who teaches in Cetinje; the other between a young Muslim woman named Aliye and a young Serb man named Toma. Toma faces conflicts of his own: his father, Danilo, wants him to look back into the past and continue the 500-year-old fight against all of Great Serbia's enemies, while his mother, Sofia, wants him to look to the future, leave for America, and secure an education. Less deftly handled are a couple of important plot elements. When an important character suffers a wrist injury late in the novel, the incident seems contrived, forced upon the narrative in order to advance plot developments that Lawrence seems anxious to introduce. And a natural cataclysm that occurs at a climactic point of action in the novel has a definite air of deus ex machina about it; it seems to have been imposed upon the novel's plot, rather than to grow logically out of it. But if you're looking for an unashamedly old-fashioned adventure story, "Montenegro" may be to your liking.

Lawrence has written a brilliant novel full of history, politics and romance. The reader will care about the characters and shudder at the foreshadowing of Balkan conflicts. The prose is rich and with many exquisite description of human emotions and natural phenomna. I am only sorry that Lawrence does not have string of novels to his credit. I would surely read him again.

An excellent novel that deserved much more attention than it got. My rating of 4 probably would have been about 4.4 if finer increments were used.

Lawrence has done his homework. The scene is 1908, just before three successive wars sweep through the Balkans. It is a time of palpable tension between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, between Serb and Muslim families on the ground. It is a time of great change in Montenegro. Auberon Harwell, a young British botanist stumbles into the mountains and becomes a catalyst for events great and small. He witnesses both the unstable dance of dying empires and the clash of generations as Toma, the Serb boy, is caught between his nationalist father and his mother who will sacrifice anything to spirit her son away from an early Balkan death. The book's greatest achievement is its detailed eye for the terrain, the people, and the atmosphere of Montenegro. It is a wonderfully evocative diary, a slice of Balkan life that rings true.

This novel is most dissapointing. It is a rather dreary, depresing, and drawn-out story with little content, badly related to the story of the Balkan Wars and drastic changes that occurred in 1908 and soon after in the area the author describes. The pity is that Starling Lawrence certainly can write and doubtless did much research. What was needed here was to boil this slow-motion story down to about a quarter its length, add in much more relating to the overall historical events, add a little color and life to the story, and have things actually happen in the fitst 200 pages. I gained more knowledge of the Balkans from a single map in the Historical Atlas of East Central Europe than I did from this entire book.