Customer Reviews

In Xanadu: A Quest

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"In Xanadu", Dalrymple's first book began as a pursuit of Marco Polo's trail from Jerusalem to China, ending in the summer palace of Kubla Khan at Xanadu, north of modern Beijing. Marco Polo, was the Italian merchant who went to China in 1271, and returned with new discoveries including gunpowder, pasta, paper, silks, etc. Dalrymple creates an interest in his trip because he combines human characteristics with geographic and historic significance, so that the reader feels personally involved in the trip.

In addition to being a superb adventure travelogue, Dalrymple has infused historical details in "In Xanadu". He is a scholar of ancient history, and punctuates his observations with historical facts and anecdotal quips. It is amazing how he notes in great detail conversations, descriptions and moods that transcend the pages to allow the reader to experience first hand the locations he describes. Contrary to Paul Theroux, however, Dalrymple gives the impression that he actually enjoys the people he meets, even though sometimes you could imagine that he has a smirk on his face as he talks to them. He is non-judgmental about their lives or surroundings, be they Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, or Christian.

The most striking features of his trip are the risks he seems to take in meeting with people who do not speak his language, eating foods he does not recognize, staying in inns that feel more like latrines, riding in buses that do not have luxuries like seats, and most importantly, venturing into China without a permit (which he is unable to get due to the confusion between the different Chinese authorities he contacts in the countries he visits).

Dalrymple is a most interesting author of historical travel books, and I can't wait to see what he is going to choose for his next adventure.

Of the three William Dalrymple books I've read this one is the least satisfying. Its a fun read but ultimately not a very substantial one. City of Djinns & Age of Kali are both excellent books on India and highly recommended. In Xanadu is one of those travel books that is dominated by its itinerary. You hear lots of exotic sounding words and place-names but are not left with much more than a glimpse of each place passed through. Each country just feels like a check point as the border crossings are what give the book what drama and humor it has. For example in Iran he is detained by a policeman at a remote checkpoint but when he produces his Cambridge library card the officer exclaims, "Oh, Agah, by the great Ali! This is the most famous university in the world." And then the officer not only lets him go but offers his services as a tour guide. It is a funny story but as a reader you begin asking yourself what the point of the journey is if all Dalrymple is really concerned with is crossing borders and finding the next mode of transport to get him to the next town. The journey at times feels more like an endurance challenge than anything else. Dalrymple does quote from a number of great travel writers at timely moments along the way but in doing so he simply makes you wish you were reading their books instead of his. There are a number of books about the Silk Road or Persia in particular(Robert Byron's In Oxonia) that may be worth considering as an alternative to this book. Dalrymples expertise is architecture and he spends time speculating about the medieval churches and crusader fortifications which he encounters. The few architectural passages are interesting and informative but there are only a few of them. Later he will put his architectural expertise to much greater use in Delhi for his book City of Djinns. There is an admirable amount of information in the book but there are a few moments when he suggests that he is perhaps the first person since Alexander the Great or Marco Polo to see certain sights at which time you become very aware of the authors age. By the time he arrives at the ruins of Xanadu you feel Dalrymple has conned you into believing he has actually achieved something. And when he quotes the poem by Coleridge with his girlfriend I was kind of embarrased for the author. After leaving Xanadu and seeing that his journey has come to a close he feels depressed and then quotes Sir Richard Burton who after reaching Mecca wrote about experiencing a depression. But no reader of travel books will mistake Dalrymple for Burton. After all the Silk Road is now for the most part a paved highway and the most formidable foe most ravelers are likely to encounter is the drinking water. Dalrymples later books are much better. He wrote City of Djinns after living in Delhi for five years and the book is a well organized telling of that citys long and diverse history with portraits of its most famous inhabitants. And Age of Kali full of excellent reportage and gives you detailed glimpses of the different regions of India.

Praise has been heaped upon this book, and deservedly so. As a first book by a young author it is an astounding achievement. It is captivating, well-informed, witty and warm. He moves skillfully from historical accounts to present-day portrayals of people and places, from anecdotes to lessons in art history. Almost anyone can travel, even to remote and dangerous places, and many can write about it, but few can match William Dalrymple in giving an evocative and intelligent account and in taking the reader on a wonderful journey.

Well not quite, but sort of.

At least this is what I kept thinking of as the author (referred to as Fatso by Mick, an expatriate hippie in Kashgar) and his travel companion Laura (she's the one clad in black) head out across Iran.

They are on a madcap quest, ostensibly to retrace the tracks of Marco Polo in his journey from Jerusalem to the seat of power of Kublai Khan in Xanadu, bearing oil from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Dalrymple, a student at Cambridge, came up with this idea to kill time between college terms. Presumably the quasi academic cover was in some way necessary, and the intermittent references to Polo and his voyage are mildly interesting. But really this is a chronicle of a road trip plain and simple - a 1980's kind of On the Road.

The Silk Road, that is.

Anyway, all this makes for idle but entertaining reading, filled with intelligent observations and humorous snippets.

Here, for example, is the English menu from a restaurant in Turkey:

Kujuk Ayas Family Restrant

Ingliz Menuyu

Soap

Ayas soap
Turkish tripte soap
Sheeps foot
Macaront
Water pies

Eats From Meat

Deuner kepab with pi
Kebap with green pe
Kebap in paper
Meat pide
Kebap with mas patato
Samall bits of meat grilled
Almb chops

Vegetables

Meat in eathernware stev pot
Stfue goreen pepper
Stuffed squash
Stuffed tomatoes z
Stuffed cabbages lea
Leek with finced meat
Clery

Salad

Brain salad
Cacik - a drink made ay ay
And cucumber

Frying Pans

Fried aggs
Scram fried aggs
Scurum fried omlat
Omlat with brain

Sweets and Rfuits

Stewed atrawberry
Nightingales nests
Virgin lips
A sweet dish of thinish batter with butter
Banane
Meon
Leeches

Recommended reading if ever you find yourself on an over civilized vacation.

This a travelogue of Dalrymple's voyage along the ancient Silk Road. It is absolutely fascinating. He goes places that are not going to be open to Americans for a very long time, and to all of the places that we hear about on the news every day: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan. There is also a lot of stuff that I didn't know about the Palistinian existance in Israel.

Dalrymple comes across as an insufferable prick, but a very ammusing insufferable prick. After all, who amongst us didn't think that we were the height of intellectual maturity as college students? The only really annoying bit his how he doesn't realize, though we do, how wonderful his first traveling companion is. Instead, he spends his time mooning over his ex-girlfriend, who the reader can tell is a complete flake.

This isn't a great book, but it's a very interesting book, and very fun. It offers great background reading on the recent history of the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Anyone who is interested in what's going on there now (and I hope that everyone is interested as there is a war on) should read this book.

Dalrymple's account of how he duplicated the journey of Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Mongolia is amusingly familiar to anyone who has travelled cross-culturally into Asia. The dramas and the dangers of backpacking haven't changed much since he made his trek in the 1980s, so it remains a relevant read. The historical background is well-researched and fascinating - so little has been written in English that draws comparisons between Western, Greco-Roman history and that of ancient Asian history. This book would be a gem if only for its historical content. As it is also entertaining, it's priceless!

I very much enjoyed William Dalrymple's "From the Holy Mountain," but this book was a disappointment. It was Dalrymple's first book, and if you consider it as a novice's starting effort and read it with an appropriately moderate level of expectations, you probably won't be disappointed. But the book was overpraised by the British press, and the effusive blurbs on the cover and inside led me to expect something significantly better than what Dalrymple actually produced.

"In Xanadu" recounts a 12,000-mile journey, four-month journey from Jerusalem to Beijing that Dalrymple took in the summer of 1986. That bare description of the trip should alert you to one of the book's main problems. To cover 12,000 miles in the something less than four months of his summer vacation from Cambridge University, Dalrymple had to keep moving at an average clip of 100 miles per day. That wouldn't leave a great deal of time for sight-seeing under any circumstances, but it leaves even less when you're traveling by bus and train in Third World countries where departure schedules are unpredictable and unexpected delays frequent. Indeed, after he crosses the Iranian border on his way east, Dalrymple's account suggests that he spent as much time waiting fruitlessly for transport as he did actually seeing anything of substance in the countries he was passing through.

The first half of the book, which takes you from Jerusalem to central Iran, is far and away the best part, because during this leg of the trip Dalrymple gave himself time to see some things along the way. In particular, he takes the time to relate what he was seeing with what Marco Polo might have seen seven hundred years earlier, which was ostensibly the point of the whole journey.

Then, alas, on page 149, Dalrymple is awoken one morning in Saveh, Iran by his travelling companion Laura, who brusquely informs him that "We're barely halfway to Lahore and I've got to be back in Delhi within the week." This makes it necessary to cover almost 2,500 miles across Iran and Pakistan at a pace of 300+ miles a day. At around this point Marco Polo largely disappears from Dalrymple's account, hardly to return until the very end of the book. On the western China leg of the trip, Dalrymple is foolishly determined to travel through a forbidden zone near the Chinese nuclear testing facility at Lop Nor - supposedly for the sake of following Polo's route - but his passage through this region has to be so rushed and furtive as he attempts to avoid security personnel that it is essentially pointless. In the end, the last two-thirds of Dalrymple's trip sounds like it was an utterly miserable experience, raising the question of why anyone would want to spend 150 pages reliving the experience with him.

It is true (as various of the review blurbs indicate) that Dalrymple is sometimes very funny. But he isn't as consistently funny as is Paul Theroux, for example, and he is whiny and self-pitying at least as often as he is funny. Moreover, over time I got really tired of his disparagement and mocking of many of the locals: he christens one young Pakistani who agreed to drive him and his traveling companion from Quetta to Lahore "Psycho," for example, for no other reason than his breakneck driving habits - but these were apparently necessary to meet the deadlines that Dalrymple's demanding traveling companion had imposed on them.

If you want to read about a cross-Asia trip that followed in the footsteps of Marco Polo, I would instead recommend "Danziger's Travels," by Nicholas Danziger. Danziger did a similar trip a year or two earlier in the mid-1980's, but he took more than a year to do it, and he didn't shy away from traveling through Afghanistan, as Dalyrmple did (albeit understandably). (Danziger's account of the fighting in the ancient caravan city of Herat is particularly vivid.) Or read Dalrymple's account of the Middle East's last Christians in "From the Holy Mountain." Either of those would be a better investment of your reading time than this volume.

I read this book on an airplane journey, and laughed so hard at some entries that I cried.
And then I got depressed, because I realized that at the author's age, I would have been incapable of the deft writing and erudition he displayed.

The idea of following Marco Polo is a provocative one. I enjoy Dalrymple's accounts of the journey. However, I did not anticipate the amount of the text that would be devoted to elaborate descriptions of architecture. It seems as though every time the action lags, (for whatever reasons) the author resorts to some sort of florid default. I do not know if the author was schooled in architecture, but it sure seems so from the persistent convention of architectural description. I have nothing against this discipline, but I specifically chose this book because I thought that it would NOT be like a thousand textbooks I have seen on similar subjects. Happily, the "traveller on-the-go" sections were remarkably funny and entertaining.

Simply put, I think Dalrymple is the best travel writer out there today. He has the unique ability to blend informative passages with wit, so that the reader can truly appreciate the places he is reading about. He is simply a virtuoso with the pen. This is his first novel, and is an account of his travels from Jerusalem to the court of Kublai Khan in Mongolia to spread a bit of holy oil at the site of Kublai's court. It is a fascinating read, and there's quite a lot of info in the book about Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. I exhort all to read it.