Book review: The Broken Road, by Patrick Leigh Fermor

by Patrick Leigh Fermor
New York Review Books Classics
4 stars 
Jenny Hendrix

Patrick Leigh Fermor, one of travel literature's most colourful, beguiling pedestrians, decided to walk across Europe when he was 18: in the winter of 1933, equipped with a rucksack, walking stick, military greatcoat, puttees, and The Oxford Book of English Verse, he hopped on a boat to Rotterdam, the Netherlands, pointing his hobnailed boots in the direction of what he'd always call Constantinople, where he'd arrive in just over a year.

Eighty years later, we finally have the complete account of that trip.

In 1962, Holiday magazine asked Fermor to write an article on "The Pleasures of Walking". He managed to cover the first two-thirds of the journey in a mere 70 pages, but the conclusion ballooned into a book of its own.

For a while he abandoned the project altogether. By the time he took it up again, 10 or so years later on, he'd decided to start from the beginning again and write three books. A Time of Gifts, which covers his walk from the Netherlands to the middle Danube, was published in 1977. Between the Woods and the Water followed nine years later, taking him as far as the Iron Gates separating the Balkan and Carpathian mountains and ending with the words "To be concluded". The posthumous publication of The Broken Road is something of a stand-in for the long, long awaited third volume. It is assembled by his biographer, Artemis Cooper, and British writer Colin Thubron, who both claim that "scarcely a phrase" in it is theirs.

By the time Fermor died, in 2011 at the age of 96, "Volume III" had been in the works for more than half a century. It could have been a case of writerly perfectionism gone awry, but if The Broken Road is any guide, Fermor was on the right track.