Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia Book

Google keeps blanking out on the title, but there's a Ford Madox Ford novel where the main character hears about a friend's engagement and asks himself why any man would choose to get married. Then he comes up with a generous explanation: well, he thinks, maybe the careful study of one woman gives you a sort of map of all the rest.

See, that's just crazy enough to work. Not that I've ever tried the experiment myself, but in my better moments, I can almost understand the logic. I'm not even talking about marriage per se, really - just a certain philosophy of life. Sometimes I have this dim suspicion that the only way to get a handle on the universe is to scrutinize a tiny corner of it with passionate intensity. Then I get sucked into the MILF portal on Youporn again and the whole vexed question evaporates into a metaphysical mist.

Rebecca West, as far as I know, faced no such distractions. She found her particular corner of the universe in that doomed federation formerly known as Yugoslavia. Already a successful, middle-aged writer when she first visited the Balkans, she discovered a place where the innards of history were just kind of hanging out, painfully exposed. "Take the lid off of life, let me look at the works," goes a line in an old Mekons song. For West, Yugoslavia is where the lid came off.

At 1100 pages, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a very big book - a vast, teeming, magnum-opussy thingamajig combining history, travelogue, political theory and ethnographic fantastication. So, yeah, not for everybody. I happen to think it's a work of genius, but even so, it took me well over a year to get through. A genius can be a huge pain in the ass, you know? Their whims and prejudices are so much more extravagant than other people's. Sometimes I almost prefer a nice, interesting minor talent.

But in order to explain why this huge, maddening book is worth reading, I'm going to tell a trivial anecdote dressed up as an allegory.

One of my co-workers recently competed in the World Jujitsu Championships in California. When he came back to work, we asked him how he did. "I got destroyed," he answered cheerfully. "But you know, you always learn something. After you come to, you think: huh, I've never seen that before."

On a purely intellectual level, that's what great writing can do - knock you on your ass and make you think: huh, I've never seen that before. Whatever else she is, West is a great writer. Just as a putter-together of interesting sentences, she's got some serious flair. Sometimes she'll come at you with a whimsical simile:

[She] was fat in the curious way of beautiful middle-aged Turkish women. She did not look like one fat woman, she looked like a cluster of beautiful women loosely attached to a common centre.

Or she'll take some historical figure and efficiently condense him, like so much evaporated milk:

Prince Montenuovo was one of the strangest figures in Europe of our time; a character that Shakespeare decided at the last moment not to use in King Lear or Othello, and laid by so carelessly that it fell out of art into life.

A bizarre'and bizarrely beautiful'passage finds West hallucinating in what is apparently the Balkans' worst toilet:

The lavatory was of the old Turkish kind…The whole floor was wet. Everybody who used the place must go out with shoes stained with urine…The dark hole in the floor, and something hieratic in the proportions of the place, made it seem as if dung, having been expelled by man, had set itself up as a new and magically powerful element that could cover the whole earth with dark ooze and sickly humidity.

As in that last example, West's prose gives off occasional whiffs of something infernal, almost apocalyptic. This isn't surprising given that she was writing in the spooky dusk of the late 1930s, and that by the time she added an epilogue in 1941, London was in flames ("Often, when I have thought of invasion, or a bomb has dropped near by, I have prayed, "Let me behave like a Serb.""). This gives the book a terrible urgency, as if West felt she might be writing an extended obituary for her civilization. And in a way, it is a funeral oration - for Yugoslavia, for a certain idea of Europe, for everything beautiful that ends up getting defaced or beaten down by history.

All of which is to say that Black Lamb and Grey Falcon isn't really a book for the iPhone age. It's just too big and dense and idiosyncratic. But that's alright: it'll still be here when we get tired of Angry Birds, or the bombs start falling again, whichever comes first.