![]() The descriptions of waking in unfamiliar places are so seductive that even the most home-hugging reader will long to wake somewhere unknown. Exuberance is expressed in heightened suggestions: a cat is panther-like, a silence falls "like angels flying overhead" and swifts make a sound like scissors in a barber shop. And while his older self clearly enjoyed writing about the nights of revelry around campfires with belly-dancing Greek fishermen and other wild characters, he was also happy to laugh at the young Leigh Fermor – for not realising that the woman who welcomed him so warmly into the brothel expected more from him than his head on a pillow.Īlso evident are another of the joys of the earlier books – the pyrotechnics of his writing. There are nights in shepherds' huts, down-at-heel hotels, palaces, and a brothel he mistook for an inn. Travelling mostly on foot, in leather jacket, knee breeches and puttees, with backpack, Hungarian walking stick and "uncompromising" boots, carrying two books of verse in the backpack and a head full of literature and history, he has his fair share of luck and adventure in a continent that was still a mystery. His allowance of £1 a week – bank notes arriving like manna at post offices along the way – was enough to live modestly. The first two volumes were a joy to read, not least for Leigh Fermor's ability to recapture in later life the intense excitement of being a young man lighting out. ![]() This, clearly, has involved more than spell-checking, although they claim that "there is scarcely a phrase that is not his". Now she and the travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron have prepared the work for publication. It takes Leigh Fermor not to Istanbul, the intended final destination of what he called "the Great Trudge", but to Burgas, 50 miles from the Turkish border.Īlthough Leigh Fermor was still rewriting the manuscript shortly before his death, the work was problematic, for reasons Artemis Cooper makes clear in her brilliant recent biography of the man. It turns out there was a manuscript and it picks up where the previous one ended – at the water, the Danube, and the Iron Gates, a gorge at the Romanian-Bulgarian border. Rumours as to whether Leigh Fermor had managed to complete his trilogy, or whether he had even started the conclusion, have circulated for the past couple of decades. Between the Woods and the Water, which appeared in 1986, ended with the promise that the story would be continued. In 1962, a US magazine asked him to write about walking – a 5,000-word commission that spawned a trilogy. "Keeping them up to date had acquired the charm and mystery of a secret religion, solemnized daily." The books came later… much later. "My whole life had seemed to revolve around those stiff-covered exercise books," he said. Before that, at 18, he walked across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul (which he still called Constantinople). In the second world war, he assisted in a partisan mission to kidnap a Nazi general on Crete. By the time he died, in 2011, 96-year-old Leigh Fermor had acquired near legendary status. ![]() T he final volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor's trilogy is almost as hard to review as it was to write. ![]()
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