Seeing through the past darkly

Peregrine Hodson

JOURNEY TO KHIVA by Philip Glazebrook Harvill, £16, pp. 273

Joumey to Khiva is a literary pilgrimage in the footsteps of the men who went to Central Asia as players in the Great Game. Mr Glazebrook is one of those rarities, an armchair traveller who gets out of his arm- chair and visits the places which others merely dream about. As a fellow traveller I am sure he is a charmingly curmudgeon companion. Armed with £4,000 for a month in Russia, Turkestan and Uzbek- istan — a fabulous sum in countries with disintegrating economies — he still man- ages to have a rotten time.

He sets off from the Travellers Club in London. He chooses to go to Moscow by train:

If I was to catch up with the men whose adventures in Central Asia so intrigued me — with Colonel Baker, say, starting out from Charing Cross in the April of 1873 with his ton of luggage, salmon rods included — the boat train seemed the proper way to begin.

Mr Glazebrook is burdened with another kind of luggage. Kindly, one might say that he is too much in love with the past to see what is happening in the present.

Arrival in Moscow is an anti-climax. 'Here I am in Moscow,' he writes tut the wonder fades awfully soon.' He buys a tick- et for an Intourist tour and has a boring time, but he meets a nice American who

had prepared himself with a thoroughness which ensured the success of his tour, for his present knowledge meant that he knew what further questions he wanted answered by his journey,

unlike the author.

Those who, like myself, aren't altogether sure what they are looking for — but hope to recognise it when it turns up — have to spend their time less purposefully.

The American is appalled that Mr Glaze- brook has not bothered to learn the lan- guage.

I had no excuse, except that it is not Russia that attracts me but Russia's Asiatic provinces, where Turki would be the more useful language.

But he hasn't learned Turki either. Mr Glazebrook also resents the information that is offered by guides and interpreters. He hates the Tretyakoff Collection:

I found myself in the Europe-centred trap of seeing in their paintings only echoes and pastiches, not to stay travesties, of European painters already familiar to me. Consequent- ly I saw nothing original, nothing interesting.

In contrast, he finds his experience of queueing Moscow-style worth a couple of pages of description.

Philip Glazebrook's journey to Khiva is almost entirely without incident. Perhaps he was unlucky that the most dramatic event occurred near the beginning, while he was still in Moscow, when he had to defend himself against a burglar who attacked him with a knife. He was lucky to survive. The rest of the book is a catalogue of disenchantments. When he writes that 'travelling through Russia alone makes you cling to Intourist like a child to mother's hand', the reader should be warned that there are no surprises. Advised against going to Tashkent by train he takes the safer option and goes by plane, although he regrets dodging the ordeal.

In Tashkent he meets his interpreter and minder called Alex, who is Ukrainian: `r-le was without curiosity. I liked him already.' He has already decided not to make any efforts to endear himself to his Uzbek hosts, 'certainly turning over no new leaf as far as grumpiness was concerned', and he is scolded by them, Alex translating, for not caring about the Uzbeks' present and future. He asks himself the question which the reader may have been pondering for some time: 'What did I want of Turkestan? Not libraries and professors, certainly. What then?' The innocent reader may think he is getting material for a travel book, but Philip Glazebrook's answer is a cricketing metaphor:

'A blinding light and a bumping pitch'; the pitch where the Great Game was played: that in a nutshell, was what I had come to see.

But as every schoolboy knows, or at least every player, whatever else it may be the Great Game is not cricket. His Uzbek hosts are unimpressed.

Next stop is Samarkand. 'It is hell. never saw an uglier town.' (Try Osaka, Nagoya, Urumci or Fosse-sur-Mer). He dismisses his guide, 'there was no need to waste ammunition pumping leaden facts into my corpse'. He tires of the local cul- ture. 'Archaeological remains of the time of Attila, of Timur and of Babur don't much excite me,' although

I couldn't help feeling that it was rather won- derful, whether or not I appreciated my sur- roundings, to be the only tourist in so celebrated a spot as the centre of Samarkand.

Hmm.

The next stage of the journey is by car to Bokhara, where Mr Glazebrook finds the heat oppressive. He attends a Festival of Uzbek music with a tour group of Euro- peans from his hotel. 'I watched with naY hands over my ears.' He finds it difficult to concentrate in the presence of other peo- ple:

Once let a link form itself, one little hook of interest snag your mind, and it is fatal to the buoyancy of solitude,

and he goes back to his hotel. The next day he wanders around the town, thinking about 19th-century adventurers, such as Stoddart, whom he imagines

riding in that glassy state of pride which iS aware only of self — which takes in nothing of the outside world, being intent wholly on holding up the fabric within.

At last he has a good time:

I was pleased with everything, satisfied to have marinated the Bokhara of my imagina- tion in a long day's reflective wandering through Bokhara itself.

He sees some boys playing football in the town square and wonders if they are kick- ing the ball over the graves of Connolly and Stoddart who were buried there.

The rest of the book is heavy going and the suspicion grows that the author is struggling to make a book out of his jour- ney. The narrative struggles on under the weight of great slabs of Victorian travel- ogues, and the sentences get longer and longer, with several running over the 100' word mark and the record-breaker clocking in at a breathtaking 123 words.

By now the reader is entitled to ask whY Mr Glazebrook bothered to leave his arm- chair since almost everything he sees On hears is so boring/ugly/depressing.

What had I expected? [he asks plaintively] What did I want? I think I had expected Khiva to express what I wanted. !Oliva itself to be the destination of the journey and so t° show me in its streets and buildings — in 01Y feelings when I arrived — what it was I vi.as looking for .. . But reaching Khlva expressed nothing. It was not the destination. The journey to Khiva is a wild-goose, chase, but in the hands of Intourist there iS nothing wild about the journey, the goose

is tame and the result is an egg. No Turki. .Back in London, after recovering from his journey in the Travellers Club, Mr Glazebrook goes for a walk and ponders his unsatisfactory excursion to Central Asia. He remembers the boys playing foot- ball in Bokhara and concludes:

I had been misled by Newbolt's verse, (about the 'bumping pitch and the blinding light'), into expecting cricket, that's all.

in other words, a duck.

Peregrine Hodson 's most recent book, A. Circle Round the Sun: A Foreigner in Japan was published by Heinemann last year. Journey to Khiva is short-listed for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Awards 1993.