Paddy Fermor is an absolutely sui-generis person and writer. This post-war account of his travels through the Caribbean isles comes on the heels of his service with the SOE behind enemy lines in Greece and Crete where he, amongst other things, was the only agent - of whom I am aware - to capture a Nazi General single-handedly, in occupied Greece. And yet, he is anything but smug or bluff, but rather singularly self-effacing in all his writing, falling in love, or yearning to do so, with everyone and, more significantly here, every place where he sojourns and giving the people and the place centre-stage. Also, he refrains from even a hint of talking down to the reader and gives him/her conversations in the French Créole patois as he hears them, and weaves his erudition into the lush writing in a manner which involves the reader with a particular island's lore and history in a mesmerising, rather than off-putting manner. The detailed history which Fermor gives of each island is always fascinating and well-told, and helps to put the sights, sounds, smells he encounters into a deeper context, lending the reader his own deep sense of atavism such as one usually only encounters in works of great literature, such as the best of Conrad and Powys.
It is quite beyond the scope of a review such as this one to attempt to impart Fermor's experience on each of the islands, or to compare or to contrast them. There is this book for that! It is even beyond the scope of this reviewer to delve the into Fermor's impressionistic, Romantic mindset, for Fermor does it much better himself describing Martinique:
"We rose to leave when the rain abated, and found that the moon had broken through the clouds. The garden was a faint constellation of flowers that were only distinguishable by their pallor from the darkness. Under the dripping mango trees, tier on tier of lawn descended into the darkness. The air was warm and scented, and the forest, faintly rimmed with silver, completely surrounded this high, sloping world. The singing of some Negro women floated up from the village with the echo of the falling waves and the faint gasp of the shingle.
Moments like this fill one with gratitude; not necessarily so much because of their incidental beauty, but because of the understanding they bring; they act as a Rosetta stone to a whole system of hieroglyphs. That house, those lights and voices and flowers and smells and sounds, I felt, gave me a better chance of grasping the atmosphere, the scope and mood of Créole life in the Antilles than a library full of memoirs and chronicles."
Not to the exclusion of memoirs and chronicles, to be sure, but the reader must surely succumb to the poetic nuances of Fermor's prose to grasp this enchanted Rosetta stone and develop a sixth sense as to places and people in the reading of this unique labour of love.
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Top reviews from other countries
Terry D
A brilliantly written story of a Caribbean island odyssey
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 26, 2013
Kevin Fletcher
His prose is utterly delightful. It's like eating chocolate cake!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 9, 2019Mr. John F. Knight
As described
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 21, 2021generally grumpy
Dated but worthy. Pity about the small print .
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 1, 2020
