The Places in Between, by Rory Stewart

The Places in Between, by Rory Stewart, is a fine example of narrative, human and landscape portraitures, cultural analysis, and personal memoir and reflection. The book recounts the author’s walk, from west to east, across Afghanistan in the winter months following the September 11 attacks in New York and the defeat of the Taliban government in Afghanistan. The reasons for the walk do not ever come quite clear, though Stewart on occasion hints at them. What he does say, all that he is really able to say, is that he had to do it.

Rarely have I found a book so readable, and the narrator/author so enigmatic and engaging.

Afghanistan was in turmoil when Stewart began his walk. It remains in turmoil today. Everyone he meets is suspicious of him and what he is doing. Sometimes he admits to being Scottish, and at other times he pretends to be Indonesian and Muslim. He walks through the regions of numerous Afghani tribes, and his account provides a vivid sense of the diversity of people in this nation, and an understanding of the conflicts they have suffered.

A guiding spirit for Stewart in his walk is the 16th-century Mughul Indian Emperor Babur, who also traveled with his armies through Afghanistan, following the same general track, and writing his own account of his journeys. Like Stewart, Babur was something of a poet, and his narrative of his journey, which Stewart often cites, provides a sometimes ironic, sometimes humorous, always illuminating counterpoint to Stewart’s own story.

In his walk Stewart meets numerous Afghanis along the way. He presents them as human individuals and is largely free of western prejudices. Some he likes better than others. He simply describes what he encounters. At times he makes judgments, offers analytical observations. On other occasions, he simply describes. His style is extremely precise and economical, but it beautifully evokes the land through which he walks.

Halfway through the walk Stewart picks up a huge dog, whom he names Babur after his medieval guiding spirit. The dog accompanies Stewart for the remainder of his journey. He is an old and aging animal, and the journey is a struggle for him. Stewart’s love and admiration for Babur is touching, and in a way it reveals his own essential loneliness. One of my favorite passages:

Babur the dog, in the heart of the blizzard, stopped to savor the bouquet of a wet grass hummock. As we moved on the weather shifted, as did the sharp angles of the slopes, revealing new valleys on each side. My mind flitted from half-remembered poetry to things I had done of which I was ashamed. I stumbled on the uneven path. I lifted my eyes to the sky behind the peaks and felt the silence. This was what I had imagined a wilderness to be.

Stewart never speaks of being lonely, but it is hard not to find loneliness in his story. Here he is walking through the vast empty reaches of an alien land, one which he knows well but in which he does not find himself particularly welcome. A westerner among easterners, he seems always on the lookout for connections, and only rarely does he make them. Only in Babur does he make a deep friendship.

The further he walks, the deeper he moves into hostile territories. In a chapter close to the end of the book, he describes an encounter with Taliban sympathizers in a town that is still largely unreconstructed. The tension in this chapter, as he is continually accosted and questioned by men who may or may not mean to do him harm, is intense. At one point three men invite him to go with them to inspect the town spring. He declines. Later one of them laughingly tells him that if he had gone with them they would have killed him.

Stewart apparently is a kind of polyglot, at least where it comes to Asian languages, and this ability serves him well as he makes his way on his walk. His knowledge of Asian history allows him to place in perspective the cultures and regions through which he passes. He makes clear that Afghanistan is a region that has often been at war, within itself as with other nations. Various tribes and religions have clashed. Yet never has the country suffered so deeply as it did beginning with the Soviet invasion in 1980 followed by the Taliban takeover in 1990 and then the overthrow of the Taliban by U. S. led forces in 2001. The Russians cruelly treated various tribes, but no group seemed more intent on erasing the remnants of earlier culture as the Taliban, who destroyed anything that clashed with their faith. Stewart dispels the notion that the Afghanis would have welcomed the Americans and British forces that invaded to overthrow the Taliban. Most of the people Stewart encounters regards them as simply another invading force, and he often has to lie about the fact that he comes from Britain in order to protect his own life.

Many of the people he meets seem indifferent to the cultures that came before them. Stewart passes through one small village built high in the mountains, on the site of an ancient capital city. The villagers are systematically excavating the remains of the buried city, but not to preserve its memory but rather to sell artifacts to western museums and treasure collectors. They are doing this because it is the only way they can make money to eat, to survive.

In a sense, Stewart presents the land and peoples of Afghanistan as a place the world ought to know better. But even more he presents it as a nation in collapse as a result of its interactions over the past decades with conquering nations. It is losing not only its identity but its culture, its history.

Towards the end of his journey, fatigued by walking and tension as he moves into hostile territory, you can sense in Stewart an irritation—with himself, with his situation, with the unfriendly and often inhospitable people he meets. He grows more willing to rely on letters of introduction from chieftains in villages through which he has passed. At points he even comes across as an ugly Westerner, willing to pass himself off as an “important person” in order to get better treatment. The chapters grow shorter, and he seems impatient with his journey. Yet on the last day of his walk he has what amounts to a moment of transcendence:

This moment was new to me. I had not dreamed or imagined it before. Yet I recognized it. I felt that I was as I was in this place, and that I had known it before. This was the last day of my walk. To feel in these final hours, after months of frustration, an unexplained completion seemed too neat. But the recognition was immediate and incontrovertible. I had no words for it. Now, writing, I am tempted to say that I felt the world had been given as a gift uniquely to me and also equally to each person alone. I had completed walking and could go home.

This is one of the best travel books I’ve read. There is a huge body of travel literature out there, much of it dating from the 18th and 19^th centuries, narratives of westerners traveling to lands that to them were alien and strange and primitive. Writers of those narratives often wrote with a perspective specific to their own culture and their own national prejudices. Stewart largely seems to avoid those prejudices. He is an excellent writer, a prose stylist of considerable skill and accomplishment. He is a careful and detailed observer, in the fullest sense of the word.