But so much of the books' poignancy comes from the awareness of the awful storm that was to sweep over Europe, leaving so many scars and in many cases total destruction. It is true that this is also a world which is rather class-ridden and occasionally interspersed with casual racism, not to speak of the terrible looming shadow of Nazism in Germany. The books certainly conjure up a world that disappeared - Leigh Fermor repeatedly comments on how, particularly with the rich and titled families who gave him hospitality, the people he met disappeared into darkness during the war and only sometimes emerged. It's entirely possible that Leigh Fermor embroidered after the fact, but his tales of mountainscapes, of dream cities and kind eccentrics are so beautiful that I don't really mind either way.
The prose is like crystalline mosaics or frescos, hovering on the edge of the unbelievable and fairytale-like, but still believable. It is not so surprising that Leigh Fermor spent decades crafting these books - there really isn't a word out of place. I have just been re-reading A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. With a remarkable personal charm and magnetism, Leigh Fermor seems to have been a sort of cross between Casanova and James Bond. He had an incredibly adventurous life which included the capture of a leading German commander in Crete during World War II. Leigh Fermor died at an advanced age in 2011, but the final book, The Broken Road, is being edited posthumously and will appear later this year.Ī great deal has been written and said about Leigh Fermor. Decades later he wrote about his travels in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. Alternately sleeping in barns and in stately homes, he travelled from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (he always calls it Constantinople, although it was Istanbul by then.) He wandered in a leisurely manner through what now seem to be the dreamscapes of Mitteleuropa before World War II. In December 1933, a young man named Patrick Leigh Fermor left England to travel on foot across Europe. Detail from The Battle of Alexander at Issus, Albrecht Altdorfer, 1529.
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