Around the Mediterranean
ABOUT this time of the year the Mediterranean, which, during our eight-month winter, might as well have been Baffin Bay for all we cared, comes suddenly to life. It is the Mediterranean-ness, more than the Latinity, we turn our thoughts to, the fringes, more than the dusty claustrophobic inlands, of Latin living; the sun, the sea-food, the transparent water, the fishing boats chugging at dawn under the window, the sunbrowned skins and the air of at least passable prosperity that we, and other northerners like us, bring in our wake—not the domestic, political, or moral life which (after all) is no holiday-maker's concern. Mediterranean life, while it keeps its nose to the agreeable grindstone of making the foreigner happy for a couple of weeks, is something few foreigners can resist—it floats through their post-estival dreams heightened to a kind of mescalin magic of the senses; but the life a small way inland from the Mediterranean shores, the daily treadmill that includes whiter, and the restrictions of poverty, law and custom, and mothers-in-law and suchlike, is something few foreigners, at least on any permanent basis, can accept.
Jasper More's The Mediterranean (Batsford, 25s.) is the coastal traveller's bedside book, a hasty scramble round the edges of a sea that never fails to be blue, on which the sun never fails to shine. It is a magnificently produced collection of fairly hackneyed but always attractive photographs, burdened, alas, by a text in which the worst banalities of the out-of-date guide-book (`it com- bines so many attractions that it can be a matter of no surprise that it became the favourite refuge of discerning tourists between the recent wars,' etc.) are combined with a peculiarly unattractive form of snobbery, silliness and sartorial advice in the style of the women's magazines. The fact is, his subject is too large for Mr. More to do more than scamper through it, and so speedy a form of travel requires, if it is not to appear absurdly sketchy, an unusual degree of insight, a kind of concreteness and solidity, and a visual imagination he appears to lack entirely.
These qualities Lord Kinross, as his Europa Minor (Murray, 18s.) shows, possesses to an impressive degree. An unspectacular traveller who has the (to me, after so many unctuous travel books, pleasant) ability to keep his critical head, however picturesque the circumstances, he has explored coastal Turkey from Cilicia to Bithynia, including in his very personal account an extraordinarily interesting agglomeration of fact, reminiscence, local history and historical reconstruction. His Byzantine chapters, and particularly his remarks on Santa Sophia, are among the most illuminating I have met; and his dry but not unenthusiastic treatment of the Turkish scene, past and present, is informative and entertaining at the same time and in about equal quantities.
Francis King has introduced and edited a beginner's guide to Greece in which the country is divided, regionally, between six writers, all of whom are either Greeks or British travellers who have spent years in the parts they describe. Introducing Greece (Methuen, 21s.), though dryish and for my taste a shade too topographical, is a successful plain guide for the averagely interested tourist with practical though often sinister details on food, drink, lodging and transport, and an air of easy enjoyment that long affection and familiarity can hardly fail to give the resident, as opposed to the passing, traveller. Mr. King's own general introduction, Robert Liddell on the iEgean, and Ian Scott-Kilvert on Athens are among the most interesting contribu- tors; unusually imaginative photographs add to the already stimulating effect.
and though Italians are perhaps the race on earth that most lays itself open to foreigners' waggishness, his Italy for Beginners (Wingate, 8s. 6d.) raises little more than a faint, sorry smile at its efforts. In writing his fast and pat little book, Mr. Mikes has just (only just) missed the bus, for he is neither quite gay nor quite serious enough, quite foreign nor quite accurate enough.
ISABEL QUIGLY
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