"The Amur River" by Colin Thubron

 Colin Thubron was born in 1939 and he is travelling in Outer Mongolia (on horseback) and Russia and China in 2020 (there is a reference to the Ukraine-Russia war) which makes him eighty! And travelling alone! On horseback (and taxi and car and riverboat and train and bus). He is amazing. (Like me, he's an Old Etonian, so we're not all like Boris.)

He travels the Amur river from the source of its longest tributary, the Onon (in a restricted area of Mongolia), into Siberia (where it is for a while the Shilka) and then along the Amur, for some time along the Russian-Chinese border and then later solely in Russian Siberia. The Mongolian section is lyrically natural, the Chinese parts thriving and full of agriculture, industry and lots of commerce, and the Russian sections depopulating, decaying and depressing, where old people eke out bleak existences in towns emptied of their young, and of hope.

The writing is wonderful; the achievement immense.

Selected quotes:

• Lyrical descriptions:
• "Across the heart of Asia, at the ancient convergence of steppe and forest, the grasslands of Mongolia move towards Siberia in a grey-green sea." (Ch 1; opening paragraph)
• "My shadow falls black over the grass." (Ch 1)
• "The young men are hefty boys with hedgehog hair." (Ch 7)
• "We walk in harsh wind along the river, whose esplanade stretches and bulges out as if for some grand future. Waves are slapping at its foot, seagulls crying, and two men bathe in the freezing shallows." (Ch 7)
• Masterful metaphors:
• "Vladik drives as if he's angry with the world." (Ch 3)
• "It is as if the words occupy a basement in his memory, and have to be pulled up one by one." (Ch 7)
• Cultural insights:
• "You can read in histories about what happened here, but often they are wrong ... it is people, not regimes or doctrines, that do these things." (Ch 2)
• "Always they are seen not as persons, but as a composite mass. Images of insects and pollutants abound." (Ch 6) Immigrants, Chinese in this case.
• "A culture less preserved than imprisoned ... as though to define and terminate a society by consigning it beneath glass: This will not return, this we have superseded." (Ch 9)
• "Mourners returning from funerals never looked behind them, for fear that the dead would overtake them and lodge in the village of the living." (Ch 10)
• "Soon the kitchen table is spread with black bread and red caviar, gherkins, wild garlic stalks, and some wandering ants." (Ch 8)
• Fascinating facts:
• "The source of great rivers is often obscure. They descend in a confusion of tributaries, or seep from inaccessible swamps and glaciers. ... The Danube, it is claimed, issues from a gutter in the Black Forest." (Ch 1) This resonated with me. When I walked the River Lee, I found its source was a concreted-over spring behind a couple of tower blocks in a suburb of Luton. The Thames oozes from a meadow in Gloucestershire.
• "Manchu ... belongs to the obscure Tungusic branch of the Altaic family, shared by Turkic peoples, Hungarians, Finns and Mongolians." (Ch 7)
• "Every few yards, across some random surface, a blackly gleaming carving appears. ... These figures are, literally, incalculably old. They belong to some distant Neolithic antiquity, perhaps six millennia ago ... The guide identifies a mystic boat - a slanted and corrugated line - which she tells me carried dead souls into the sky. ... But the most common subject, recurring at random, is a mask-like face with hollowed eyes and simian jaw, ringed by a sunburst of spokes." (Ch 9)
• "The strangest foretelling of the Amur's isolation - and its first known record in English - emerged as early as 1719 ... in The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe." (Ch 10)
• And even some humour from his last hotel room:
• "A fire notice on the door ... advises that if you cannot liquidate the burning, do not use the lift for avocation (there is no lift)." (Ch 10)

This is a brilliant book! What a great writer.

December 2022; 275 pages

Shortlisted for the 2021 Waterstones Book of the Year

Other travel (and exploration) books reviewed in this blog can be found by clicking here.

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

"Romanoff Gold: The lost fortunes of the Tsars" by William Clarke

When Tsar Nicholas I abdicated in 1917, the vast majority of the wealth of this fabulously rich absolute monarch became the property of the Russian state. After the Bolshevik coup of that year, when he, his wife and his children were sent to Siberia, they didn't have enough cash to live on although his wife and daughters still had jewels sewn into their underclothes. The assassination of the entire family at Ekaterinburg meant that other members of the extended Romanov family (at least those who were safe having fled abroad) believed they were entitled to the lost Romanov millions. Add to this the various frauds and imposters who claimed that they were members of the family who had escaped the Ekaterinburg massacre and who were attracted by the thought of the lost gold and diamonds and the chaos of the Red-White Russian Civil War immediately following the revolution during which trainloads of gold bullion with a variety of provenances seemed to wander around Siberia paying off guerillas, bandits, warlords and irregular troops, and you have a recipe for convoluted and protracted court cases.

Clarke has spent years trying to get to the bottom of who owned what and where it is now. What happened to the jewels and gold in Russia? Did the Romanovs have fortunes in gold deposits and bonds in foreign banks stashed away as a nest egg in case of revolution? And how can you separate an absolute monarch's private wealth from the wealth of the state?

This is a labyrinth which this book does little to clear up. The same sums are repeated many times, the same arguments made, so that one becomes confused or wonders whether there is not a significant amount of padding going on (a suspicion reinforced when the author starts by rather needlessly going over waht happened to the Tsar's family, most of which is well known and little of which had direct bearing on his argument). And in the end the answers seems to be a repeated no. There are no mysterious foreign deposits (and what there are are state funds that basically became a pay-off when the Bolsheviks reneged on Russian war loans). Various people accused of siphoning off Romanov wealth from an emigre banker to George V's wife were probably honest and decent people doing their best for the poor exiled Romanovs. The imposters were imposters. It's a bit of an anti-climax in the end.

What does distinguish this book (which is the 2007 Sutton Publishing edition published in Stroud, Gloucestershire) is the remarkably dreadful quality of its typesetting. Mistypings abound: Plish for Polish, 19398 for 1939 (or 1938?). Given the detailed and convoluted nature of the arguments with so many sums of money (often written in roubles, or roules on one occasion but also on guineas, pounds, dollars, Canadian dollars, and reichsmarks) even one or two misprints undermine one's confidence in the entire argument.

A very disappointing book. April 2015; 419 pages

A much better telling of the story of the Romanovs, albeit published before the DNA evidence established the truth of the Ekaterinburg massacre, is The File on the Tsar by Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold or, for a brilliant historical comparison of Nicholas II, George V and Kaiser Wilhelm II, try Three Emperors by Miranda Carter.

"Boris Godunov" by Ian Grey

This is a narrative biography of Boris Godunov, first minister to Ivan the Terrible and his son Feodor, who was then elected tsar (1598 - 1605) when the Rurikid dynasty came to an end, and was toppled by the first False Dmitri at the start of the Time of Troubles.

This is history as narrative. The tale is very simply told. Many of the principal events have been turned into legend and shrouded in mystery:
Ivan the Terrible kills his eldest son; Boris is badly wounded trying to protect the tsarevich
Feodor's brother Dmitry dies, having stabbed himself during an epileptic seizure or was he assassinated on the orders of Boris or did he escape?
Was the false Dmitry really Dmitry or an ex-monk called Grigory?
Did Boris die naturally or was he poisoned by his enemies?
Nevertheless, Grey gives them a little consideration and then plumps for the common sense explanation.

So this is biography as it used to be and it seems rather bald. Most of it is about Ivan the Terrible and the reign of Feodor and although you can argue that Boris was chief minister during both of these reigns and therefore a very important person, there isn't much actually about him. Less than a third of the book is spent on Boris's reign. I rather felt that Grey wasted an opportunity.

August 2014; 179 pages; nice, short chapters

"Catherine the Great & Potemkin" by Simon Sebag Montefiore

This was a magnificent book.

The title is deceptive. This is a biography of Potemkin. Catherine II of Russia was his lover and his monarch and his political ally and a crucial part of his life but this book is about him and she is important background.

Potemkin was minor nobility but highly intelligent, giant in stature, extraordinarily handsome (they called him Alcibiades at school, presumably more for his physical beauty than at that time for his generalship), and extrememly energetic. He therefore stood out (literally). As a young guardsman he caught the eye of the new Empress who had succeeded her husband (first in a coup, then after having him murdered) and became her 'favourite'. Even after their affair ended (she had many lovers) he worked with her to annex lands from Poland and from Turkey; it is Potemkin who made the Crimea Russian.

But what marks this book out as an epic is the extraordinarily romantic nature of the tale. It starts with his death: the dying Prince asks to be taken out by his Cossacks into the countryside and 'dies on grass having lived on gold' as an eyewitness allegedly said. But it includes a secret marriage between Potemkin and Catherine, a vast chorus of lovers, many of them his nieces, a Cossack rebellion led by a Pretender and the most extraordinary cast of characters.

Walk on parts are accorded to Napoleon (who may have tried to enlist as a young soldier in Potemkin's armies), John Howard of prison reform (and Bedford) fame, George Psalmanazar, Casanova, the allegedly 2000 year old Comte de Saint-Germain, and Count Cagliostro, the quack and charlatan who later became involved in the Diamond Necklace affair which damaged the reputation of Marie Antoinette. There are also John Paul Jones, the father of the US Navy , who also fought for Potemkin, Francisco de Miranda who fought with Bolivar to liberate Venezuela, the wonderful Duchess of Kingston, a good time girl who got rich quick from marrying into nobility and then toured European palaces, scandalously and a crew of assorted noblewomen of dubious origins who were no better than the should have been (although even the true bred aristocracy seemed to have no compunction about hopping into bed with either Potemkin or Catherine and cuckolding their complacent spouses; the Countess of Bruce had a reputation as the lady who tried out Catherine's later favourites although once Catherine caught her in flagrante with Catherine's current boyfriend). A key colleague of Potemkin's was his engineer Samuel Bentham, brother of Jeremy, the philosopher.

I particularly loved Joseph II, Kaiser of Austro-Hungary, who travelled through Russia under the oncognito Comte de Falkenstein. He called himself 'first clerk of the state' and loved to travel with only one or two companions and bed down on a military mattress in a flea-bitten roadside inn. There weren't many in Russia so Potemkin turned mansions along the route into taverns, a sort of echo of the plot of She Stoops to Conquer that had been first performed seven years previously.

I absolutely loved this big book. It is big and occasionally heavy but the verve of the narrative and the dash of these wonderful characters make it every bit as good a read as the author's brilliant Young Stalin and incomparably better than his Jerusalem.

Must be read! July 2014; 557 words

"The secret speech" by Tom Rob Smith

This is the second of the Leo Demidov trilogy about a former MGB officer in Moscow as Stalin's regime gives way to Khruschev. The title refers to the 'secret' speech given by Khruschev at which he denounced the state security systems for their brutal repressions under Stalin. At the start of the novel these are being distributed to former agents who either then kill themselves from remorse or from fear of what their neighbours will say or who are killed. This is a promising beginning: it offers the opportunity for menace to stalk the city in an atmosphere of moral ambiguity. Leo is, after all, the head of the Homicide Division and unbelievably good at his job, diagnosing that an apparent murder was a concealed suicide within a few minutes of seeing the body. Alas, any pretence at a whodunnit is swiftly abandoned as the Homicide Division is dissolved and the killer reveals herself by kidnapping Leo's adopted daughter in revenge for wrongs done to her by Leo in the past. The story turns into a thriller. Leo must travel to the Hungarian uprising via a prison ship and a Gulag in order to retrieve his daughter who has undergone a Patty Hearst style conversion and fallen for a young pickpocket.

This book has clearly been written with the intention of turning it into an action thriller film. Unfortunately it would be the sort of film that millions watch and I hate. A great deal of action is packed in: the story moves on relentlessly. Tank shells explode all around Leo and his family. Lesser characters are killed off with minimal grieving. Few scenes last longer than a few pages; some moments of potentially high drama last no more than a paragraph.

The characters are mostly shallow and unbelievable. The relationship between the boy who grew up as a pickpocket and became a thriller and the rebellious teenage girl is ludicrous. The transformation of the meek wife of a priest into a hardened manipulative criminal gang leader is justified by suggesting that she became embittered in the gulags. I just don't believe any of it.

Thrill-a-minute action with minimal depth. March 2014, 449 pages