TBR: The Places in Between
This week’s book, The Places in Between, should win some sort of an award for having the blurb that best captures exactly what the book is about: "Someone in Kabul told me that a crazy Scotsman had walked from Herat to Kabul right after the fall of the Taliban… I thought the story was an urban legend. I was wrong. The crazy Scotsman was called Rory Stewart…"
Stewart is certifiably nuts. It would have been crazy for him to walk from Herat to Kabul on his own in any case. But then he decided to take the straight path (according to the map) and walk through the central mountains in the middle of winter. Oh, and he decided to adopt a dog halfway along, even though he had no way to feed it and dogs are considered unclean by most Afghanis. Why he did any of this, he never adequately explains. He was violently ill most of the way, and if it had been a slightly worse winter, it would have killed him. But it makes for a fascinating read.
The book includes a bit of history (Stewart’s path was the same as that taken by Babur, the first Mughal emperor of Afghanistan; he names the dog after Babur), and a bit of modern political commentary (he is critical of westerners’ claims to understand Islam and of modern aid workers who travel from crisis to crisis), but the heart of the book is Stewart’s description of the people he met along the way. He traveled with a minimum of gear and depended utterly on the Moslem tradition of hospitality to get people to feed and house him. And, while the quality of both food and shelter was not always great, he didn’t starve and he didn’t freeze to death.
What makes the book a pleasure is that Stewart is neither judgmental nor sentimental about the people he meets. He describes their casual attitudes towards violence and their generosity toward him, their frequent disinterest in their own history and their understanding of the wider world. He describes communities that are incredibly isolated from the rest of the world, where feudalism still reigns — in the sense that loyalties to individuals far outweigh any sense of ideology or a nation-state.
I don’t think I’d have picked this book up on my own if my brother and sister-in-law hadn’t given it to me for Hanukkah. I’m very glad they did.
