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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron Robert Byron. Byron's primary goal was to visit monuments and buildings, and a good deal of The Road to Oxiana is taken up with architecture. This is never boring or staid, however, with Byron's lively prose and strong personal opinions (including an aversion to Buddhist and Greek art) making even the sections I barely understood rather fun. As an example, here is a short comment from Delhi, right at the end of the trip. Byron's great talent is his ability to capture something of a scene or a meeting in a few words. He is a rather detached and unemotional narrator, however: we never feel threatened by the dangers he faces or exult with him at his successes. (On the other hand, neither does he inflict on us the artificial second-hand nostalgia of Bruce Chatwin's introduction to this edition.) Nor do we get much of a picture of any of the people Byron met, or of his travelling companion Christopher Sykes. Indeed he seems quite insensitive to people and culture, with that careless arrogance of the English imperial elite abroad: only a month before the end of the trip, for example, do he and Christopher realise that they can't treat the Afghan guards accompanying them as if they were English domestic servants. I know too little to really appreciate Byron's architectural commentary. Outside of that there is little of intellectual substance in The Road to Oxiana : the history is episodic, the comments on contemporary politics are often uninformed, and there is little of ethnographic depth. When all is said and done, I think I would have enjoyed as much and learnt more from an introduction to Islamic art and architecture, a history of Persia and Afghanistan, and something about life in the region in the 1930s. But it is perhaps travel writing generally that doesn't appeal to me: The Road to Oxiana is certainly an outstanding example of the genre. Cookie Consent and Choices. 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The 100 best nonfiction books: No 40 – The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937) A ccording to Robert Byron’s Oxford contemporary Evelyn Waugh – never the most reliable witness – the future author of The Road to Oxiana used to delight in shouting “Down with abroad”. Typical in striking a pose, Byron was an aggressive Oxford aesthete of the “Brideshead generation”, a homosexual wanderer whose precocious career as a travel writer and art historian can be traced through a succession of prewar gems. ( Robert Byron by James Knox, published by John Murray in 2003, remains the principal biographical source.) Byron wrote The Station , aged 22, after a visit to Mount Athos on a mule, Fortnum & Mason saddlebags bursting with a soda siphon and chicken in aspic. This was followed by The Byzantine Achievement (1929) and The Birth of Western Painting (1930). In 1933, the publication of First Russia, Then Tibet confirmed Byron’s reputation as a traveller and connoisseur. In the same year, accompanied by his friend Christopher Sykes, but tormented by his unrequited love for Desmond Parsons, Byron set out on a journey to Persia and Afghanistan, by way of Jerusalem, Damascus and Baghdad, in search of the origins of Islamic architecture. After many vicissitudes, The Road to Oxiana (the remote northern borderland of Afghanistan) became the record of his 11-month journey, a fabulous and intoxicating weave of surreal vignettes, journal entries and odd playlets. In these gorgeous pages, poetry, gossip and scholarship become braided into an exotic tapestry that dazzles as much today as it did on publication. As many critics have noted, unlike his contemporaries, such as Peter Fleming and Norman Douglas, Byron has not dated. An enthusiastic literary critical response ranged from Graham Greene, who admired Byron’s demotic, conversational brilliance, to the rivalrous Evelyn Waugh, who had to concede the book’s high spirits, via the Sunday Times , which linked Byron to his namesake (no relation) and declared him “the last and finest fruit of the insolent humanism of the 18th century”. Today, widely considered to be Byron’s masterpiece, The Road to Oxiana stands as perhaps the greatest travel book of the 20th century. It’s a title that continues to inspire hyberbole. The American critic Paul Fussell, writing in Abroad , his important 1982 study of interwar literary travelling, has judged that “what Ulysses is to the novel between the wars, and what The Waste Land is to poetry, The Road to Oxiana is to the travel book”. This extravagant claim is supported by writers as varied as Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron and William Dalrymple. In their different ways, each shares a veneration for The Road to Oxiana . Chatwin, whose debt to Byron was profound, declared it to be “a sacred text”, and campaigned to get the book back into print with Picador in 1981, after almost 50 years of obscurity. Byron starts his quest, in medias res , with himself as a “joy-hog” in Venice, immersed in the sea at Lido. The bathing, on a calm day, must be the worst in Europe: water like hot saliva, cigar ends floating into one’s mouth, and shoals of jellyfish. Once he is joined by Christopher Sykes, Byron begins to hit his stride as as an aphorist: “The King David hotel is the only good hotel in Asia this side of Shanghai.” Lines such as these will remind Byron’s readers that when, on a visit to Soviet Russia, he had encountered an Intouristguide, a Shakespeare-denier who insisted that the plays could never have been written by a grocer from Stratford, Byron had cheerfully replied: “They are exactly the sort of plays I would expect a grocer to write.” In the same spirit, Byron was untroubled by the perils of his trip. Crossing into Persia, his companion Sykes nervously rebukes him for disrespecting the shah out loud. He suggests: “Call him Mr Smith.” The road to inspiration. The Road to Oxiana, Robert Byron's account of his journey to Persia and Afghanistan in 1933-34, is widely recognised as the greatest of all pre- war travel books. As Paul Fussell neatly put it in Abroad, "What Ulysses is to the novel between the wars, and what The Waste Land is to poetry, The Road to Oxiana is to the travel book." Byron was killed in the second world war aged only 35, lost when his ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat off Cape Wrath. Yet in his brief 15 years as a writer, he achieved an astonishing amount. He was a brave and energetic traveller, an art historian of astonishing erudition, and a profoundly perceptive connoisseur of civilisations. Above all, he was a writer of breathtaking prose - prose whose sensuous, chiselled beauty has cast its spell on English travel writing ever since. For at his best Byron had a remarkable ability to evoke place, to bring to life a whole world in a single unexpected image, to pull a perfect sentence out of the air with the ease of a child netting a butterfly. The perfection and visual precision of the writing in Oxiana, combined with its wit, its farcical playlets, its intriguing scholarly essays and its fierce passion for its subject - a search for the Central Asian roots of Islamic architecture - have given the book a far greater degree of immortality than the travel writing of any of Byron's contemporaries. Few today read Waugh's travel books, or the now very dated works of Peter Fleming, all of which outsold Byron's work during his lifetime. But although Byron had little financial success from his writing while he was alive, he has gone on to be the posthumous literary mentor to almost all the best travel writers who followed him, from Patrick Leigh Fermor, Eric Newby and Colin Thubron to Bruce Chatwin, who wrote that for him, Oxiana was "a sacred text, beyond criticism". In his introduction to the 1981 Picador edition of the book, which brought Oxiana back into print after nearly half a century of neglect, Chatwin tells how he carried his copy "spineless and floodstained" on four journeys through Central Asia. For him it was, he wrote, quite simply "a work of genius". I am not neutral on this either, for I also write as an abject devotee: Oxiana had an electrifying and life-changing effect on me, and was responsible for me wanting to become a travel writer. In those days, it seemed as if Byron's elusiveness only heightened his mystique. Little seemed to be written on him, and the Picador edition of Oxiana contained only four brief lines of biography: "Robert Byron was born in 1905 and educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford.