Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (Paperback)

There are two ways to get a grip on those Balkans -- a short way and a long way. The short way is through "The Bridge on the Drina," by the Slavic Nobelist, Ivo Andric. The other is the great, sprawling monstrosity (cited above) by Rebecca West. Andric's novelized account of a near-millennium of Ottoman rule is a marvel of (if nothing else) concision. Individual set-pieces are unforgettable: the account of an impalement is not for the faint of heart.

But anything as compact as Andric's narrative must necessarily expose itself to a charge of oversimplification, That is one charge few could bring against West's 1100-odd pages (not including index and bibliographical note). This is an irony, because West on the surface appears to have an agenda so simplistic as to be crude: the Yugoslavs are a species of noble savage, while their North European "betters" - more precisely, the Germans, are a gang of buffoons. Her caustic sendup of life in a train compartment with a party of German tourists is hilarious in its own right, and it surely didn't hurt her as the book hit the market at the beginning of World War II (also: it is near the beginning, so anyone who wants to claim to have read the whole will want to get at least that far).

But facts do her the kindness of getting in the way. Agenda or no, West is one of the world's great reporters, with an enviable capacity to see not just what she wants to see, but rather what is before her eyes. The result is the best kind of journalism, and the best kind of history: a book full of exceptions "We are too rough and too deep for your smoothness and your shallowness," her guide tells her in a fit of impatience. "That is why most foreign books about us are insolently wrong." West must be wrong about a lot of things: any book so rich in detail and texture would have to be wrong about something. Thanks to her good efforts, it will be harder for her readers to be wrong.

Its reputation suffers currently because Rebecca West, writing in the late 1930s, sympathized with the Serbs, whose reputation has been darkened in our time by the atrocities of Bosnia and Kosovo.

I would guess most West opponents favor rival Croats or Albanians just as they claim she favors the Serbs. A Serb advocate might point out that Croats and Muslims committed a few atrocities of their own as Yugoslavia broke apart. And a West defender may note that she was not equipped with a crystal ball showing Slobodan Milosevic's rise a half century later.

When she wrote, the Serbs readily evoked Western sympathy: They were on the Allied side in World War I, and would be again, before the book went to press, in World War II, when they were invaded for bravely defying Hitler. They were Christians, inheritors of the legacy of Byzantium, who freed themselves from five centuries of Turkish Islamic domination, and had fought as well to free Macedonia and Bosnia. Their king had just been assassinated in France in an act machinated by Mussolini and abetted, through silence, by the world's nations. They suffered greatly throughout their history, including World War I, when the war with more powerful Austria swept back and forth over the land twice, forcing the army and many civilians to flee at one point in a horrifying death march through winter and mountains. And the Serbs had always fought with little more than moral support from great power allies, who betrayed them again and again. Weighing against them was their Orthodox Christian rite which often put them at odds with the powerful Roman Catholic Church.

This book, however much it might have seemed dated during the 1990s, takes on a greater significance in the post 9/11 world: She shows us just how deep the roots of the Christian-Islamic conflict run in this land, for centuries that conflict's front line.

West, for example, distinguishes marvelously between the Bosnian Muslims - Slavs who converted to Islam during the Turkish occupation, many of them Slav nationalists who supported Yugoslav nationhood - and the Turks themselves, who regarded the Slavs as other and inferior. She finds fascinating cross-religious alliances, with the Austrian Catholics cozying up to the Muslims of Bosnia when Austria ruled it, to the detriment of the land's Croat Catholics and Orthodox Serbs, who expected better of fellow Christians. She details a positively surreal scene in Sarajevo, where the Muslims anxiously await the first Turkish republican emissaries since the Ottomans were driven out a half century earlier. When these modern, Westernized diplomats arrive, from their land where Ataturk banned the fez and the burka, they are warm to modern Yugoslav officials, but baffled by and cool to what they regard as the still-backwards, Orientalized Muslims of Bosnia.

West got away with a writing style full of ethnic generalizations that, today, would likely be attacked, by airheads anyway, as politically incorrect, regardless of the many hard truths she wrote. A feminist, she wrote of gender in a way delightfully free of today's academic cant. You'll find nary a "patriarchy" or "hegemony" here; she talks of men and women only when it matters.

I don't believe she leans too strongly towards the Serbs. It is, after all, in great part the story of their lands, and of the short-lived state led by their monarchy. Her section on Bosnia, where the Croats, Serbs and Muslims all mixed, is fair to all sides. She finds much with which to fascinate the reader in Dubrovnik and elsewhere along the Dalmatian coast. The primary villains here are the Turks - not today's modernized, democratic Turks, but their imperial Ottoman predecessors, who sucked wealth and civilization out of the Balkans to set the stage for today's animosities. And West even manages to find some redemption for them in their transcending love of nature and the well-designed, pleasant homes they left behind.

You are unlikely to find in English a more cogent account of the Archduke Ferdinand's assassination, which led to World War I. One sees how this equalled the Kennedy assassination for its lingering scent of conspiracy - was the killing actually orchestrated by the Russians? by the Austrians themselves? - and surpassed it in shaking the world, despite targeting a much less popular or powerful man.

Many histories can supply hard facts. BLGF stands out for West's elegant travelogue writing in which she lashes together history; national and individual character; geography, ethnicity, and politics. She and her husband journey through Yugoslavia accompanied by a guide and translator who, also a poet, helps interpret the places that signify in Yugoslav history, as well as mundane settings from which West gleans the essence of the nation's many peoples.

The book's length daunts, and sometimes the writing drags. Tensions with the guide-poet's German wife during the group's trip through Macedonia take up too much space. But one can forgive even this: West finds, in this woman's hostility and condescension toward her husband's country, the attitudes that were then driving Germany toward conquest - including its brutal occupation of Yugoslavia beginning in 1941, the year this book was published.

Readers might consider countering the book's length by taking each national section - on Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia and so forth - as individual books, setting the tome down for a while before starting the next unit.

However, I find the book especially valuable as an example of the "encyclopedic" book: the kind of book that transcends genres (history? travel literature? personal essays? memoir?), that is eager to accumulate and to share knowledge, that a reader ends up wanting to live with. Even though the important conflicts of the day have shifted east from Kosovo (but her discussion of the migration of the Turks into the Balkans is essential material for understanding the place of Muslims in Europe today), her book stays with me: not for what it says about Yugoslavia, but for what it says about how literature can be the tissue that connects individuals and history. Although reading this book is by no means a minor undertaking, it's well worth the time and trouble.