Reserved and unworldly, young Miles Consterdine and his epiphanic trip to Paris is Maurice Baring's first bead on this thread of a story based on impressions received by the author in Russia and Manchuria during wartime. From here Baring allows us to peek through windows opening onto tragic and comic episodes in the lives of noteworthy people in remarkable circumstances.
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...a brimful of talent of every kind, and there runs through everything he does a streak of real originality' -- J B Priestly
About the Author
Born in London in 1874, Maurice Baring was a man of letters, a scion of a family long prominent in the financial ventures of the British Empire. The son of the 1st Baron Revelstoke (a director of the Bank of England and a senior partner at Baring Bros.) he was educated at Eton and at Cambridge, and joined the diplomatic service in 1898. In 1904 he became a journalist and reported the Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria; later he was a correspondent in Russia and Constantinople. He is credited with having discovered Chekov's work in Moscow and helping to introduce it to the West. Baring is remembered as a versatile, prolific and highly successful writer, who produced articles, plays, biographies, criticism, poetry, translations, stories and novels. He is regarded as a representative of the social culture that flourished in England before World War I, his work highly regarded to this day for the acute intimate portraits of the time.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Isaiah Berlin's Forgotten Gem,
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This review is from: Tinker's Leave (Paperback)
I picked up this book after reading somewhere that Isaiah Berlin (he of the famous fox/hedgehog dichotomy and the two-freedoms essay) cited this as a neglected work. I can certainly see why Berlin, an expatriate Russian ensconced in England, would take particular delight in the roman a clef escapades of the novel's protagonist, Miles Consterdine, a nebbishy young Englishman who on a lark decides to explore pre-revolution Russian society (as well as take a peak at the Russo-Japanese war in Manchuria). Be warned that this book's plot is highly episodic (i.e., not structured) since it is little more than the tarted-up real-life experiences of the author. I don't care much for well-crafted plots (hence my love of Charles Dickens) so that doesn't bother me. The book is engaging and not a chore to read. Further, it contains sketches of several memorable minor characters (a la Dickens). I realize this might not sound like much of a recommendation--but, given the alternatives, it is.
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