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4.0 out of 5 stars
Furry, December 9, 2003
This book is a collection of tales from adventures that the author had in South Asia in the 1950s and 1980s. The first third of the book covers the author's tenure as an English teacher at the Afghan Military Institute in the 1950s. The author had just recently finished his master's degree in English literature and accepted a job in Afghanistan as a good jumping off place for explorations throughout Central Asia. His descriptions of traveling to his post, working conditions, and the people he met in Kabul are quite entertaining. In many respects, conditions in Kabul haven't changed much at all in the 50 years since Somerville-Large was working there.At the end of Somerville-Large's stay in Kabul, a friend joined him, and they set off together to see what they could of Central and South Asia. The second third of the book covers some of these adventures, in which they didn't get as far as they had planned. They did manage to see some parts of Afghanistan, however, and they went hunting in Nepal and hiking in Bhutan. The remaining third of the book takes place in the 1980s, when Somerville-Large retraced some of his earlier journeys in Pakistan, and met a group of nomadic Kyrghiz tribesmen who had become refugees of the Afghan war. The tribesmen eventually were granted asylum in Turkey. Somerville-Large visited them there and discovered that they were forgetting their native culture. In order to help keep the memories of their former way of life alive, Somerville-Large endeavored to acquire a few yaks for the tribe. The last part of the book describes how the yaks were transported from a zoo in the UK to Turkey, a trip fraught with delays and dangers at every step. There isn't a lot unifying the stories in the book. Yes, the visit of Michael, Somerville-Large's traveling companion, serves as a transition from the Afghan stories to the South Asian stories, and the return to Afghanistan provides a link from the first part of the book to the last part. But the linkage isn't all that strong, and the stories come off as being a bit unrelated. The stories might have been published independently, except they weren't quite long enough to stand on their own and perhaps that's why Somerville-Large's publisher grouped them together in this volume. In any case, those interested in the history of modern Afghanistan or day-to-day conditions in Kabul in the 1950s will find much of interest in (the first part of) this book.
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