"News From Tartary" by Peter Fleming

 In 1935, Peter Fleming, Old Etonian (and brother of the later-to-become-more-famous Ian, author of the James Bond books), at the time a seasoned traveller and a Times correspondent attempted to travel 3,500 miles, with a French female companion called Kini, from Beijing to Kashmir, across parts of China which were remote, restricted and where there were rebellions and infiltration by both White and Red Russians. For a significant part of the journey they had no motorised transport - they spent three months without seeing any wheeled vehicle - and relied on horses, camels and donkeys. This beautifully written book is an account of their journey.

It is of its time. It speaks of racial differences when it means cultural differences. There is a definite feeling of European (and especially British Imperial) superiority (for example: "The Chinese garrison of the province was a garish and Gilbertian force, existing largely on paper and opium."; 6.1). The indigenous peoples are almost invariably represented as poor, backward, culturally bereft, dishonest, lazy, cruel to their animals (and sometimes one another) and incompetent. Fleming-the-sahib often has to bully them into doing what he wants of them. And, although he professes admiration for Kini, she is the one who cooks and sews and is in charge of the medicine.

My edition had no illustrations and I particularly missed a map.

But it is stuffed with incident (even an outbreak of plague!) and it possesses the vivid descriptions which is the hallmark of  great travel writing:

• "There was something forced and unnatural about the landscape. The little hummocks, the naked branches, looked - against the too bright, too picturesque background of sky and mountains - like the synthetic scenery which surrounds stuffed wild animals in a glass case." (4.1)
• "The sun beat down and mirage waterishly streaked the periphery of our field of vision." (5.1) I love 'waterishly'!
• "We spent five days there, lodged on a wilderness of carpets which had something of the decorative impermanence of a film set." (6.5)
• "He wore a black three-cornered hat and a rusty bottle-green coat tied around the waist with a scarf which might have been a dirty tricolour; thus clad, he looked, as he slouched along, like a minor and unsympathetic character in a play about the French Revolution." (6.6)

Selected quotes:

• "The slow train dragged itself wearily into the station - a long string of trucks ... from which the doors ... had been removed." (1.6)
• "We walked behind the lorries over a precarious bridge whose architecture seemed to be an affair of mud and mass-hypnotism." (1.8)
• "As we arrived at the inn, the building next to it - an eating-house where we had breakfasted - quietly and rather sadly collapsed, crumbling into rubble in a cloud of dust." (1.9)
• "The first day we were there a boy attached to the gold-seekers went off into the tamarisk and never came back. Search poarties ranged by day, huge bonfires blazed by night, and the lamas put in some fairly intensive clairvoyance, chanting and throwing dice to establish his geographical position. ... But the boy was never found; he must have died of hunger and thirst, perhaps only a little way away." (4.1)
• "Then there was the Lost City. We christened it in the Fawcett tradition; but I know that it is not a city and I cannot be sure that it is really lost." (4.1) Percy Fawcett was a well-known explorer of the inter-war period whose travels in the South American rain forests to locate a lost city are chronicled in The Lost City of Z by David Grann, a brilliant book (later made into a movie) which put me off exploration forever.
• "It occurs to me that there is too much grumbling in this book." (4.4)
• "We were never short of food; but, with the exception of perhaps an hour after the evening meal, there was no single moment in the day when we would not have eaten, and eaten with the greatest relish, anything that appeared remotely edible." (4.4)
• "Nobody in England now walks without putting on fancy dress to do it." (4.4)
• "Travelling Blind" (4.5, chapter heading) I include this because I have long been intending to write a novel with this title.
• "the sudden bursts of harsh song with which he emphasized rather than relieved the monotony of the march." (4.6)
• "It is a strange and terrible thing that lady novelists are right, that young men in deserts do dwell with a banal wistfulness on sentimentalized, given-away-with-the-Christmas-number pictures of their native land, forgetting the by-passes, the cloudbursts, the sheaves of bluebells lashed to motor-cycle pillions, the bungalows and the banana-skins and the bowler hats." (5.5)
• "Although we know that all men are brothers and that the peoples of the modern world are knit together in a great web of sympathy and understanding, we still find it impossible to be deeply stirred by things that happen to those fellow-beings whose skin is of a different colour to our own." (6.1)
• "The donkey, though perhaps on some beach of your childhood it provided an adventure which made you as breathless as your nurse, is a sublunary mount for the adult." (6.8) The 'nurse' tells you the social stratem for whom Fleming is writing!
• "You felt, in short, that you were at the end of the dead desert, which had swallowed - but showed no signs of having digested - the outposts of more than one civilization." (7.1)
• "You never know what may happen at a banquet in Kashgar, and each of our official hosts had brought his own bodyguard. Turki and Chinese soldiers lounged everywhere; automatic rifles and executioners' swords were much in evidence, and the Mauser pistols of the waiters knocked ominously against the back of your chair as they leant over you with the dishes." (7.2)

Peter Fleming also wrote Invasion 1940, a very amusing book about Britain's chaotic preparations at the start on the Second World War.

Other travel and exploration books reviewed in this blog may be found here.

August 2022; 389 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God