The Road to Oxiana

"Byron was Chatwin’s first conscious model. Like Chatwin, he was educated at Marlborough, he was gay, and he was an aesthete who privileged art over people. It was in Byron’s footsteps that Chatwin travelled first to Persia and Afghanistan, the countries that inspired The Road to Oxiana . The book is a candid account of a journey made in 1933 in search of Seljuk tombs – tall, cylindrical mausolea whose existence was known to Byron only through some “inadequate photographs”. Chatwin put Byron’s descriptions of Islamic architecture “at least in the front rank as Ruskin” and raised the book “to the status of ‘sacred text’, and thus beyond criticism … it was my Bible.” Byron’s previous book, The Station , was about his visit to Mount Athos, where Chatwin would discover God at end of his life, and convert to Orthodoxy."

"I think it’s one of the classic books about travelling in Afghanistan. Robert Byron is an intellectual – unlike Newby, whose genius is in the way he can see the funny side of everything. Byron is more serious, but they complement one another in a way. Byron goes to places like Herat to look at the minarets. He says the citadel’s minarets were “the most beautiful example of colour in architecture ever devised by man to the glory of his God and himself”. Yes, that’s exactly right and Herat figures as a highlight in the history of Islamic architecture. No, he wasn’t impressed. I think that’s rather strange since I think Bamiyan is magnificent. Although the buddhas have been destroyed, the place to me still has enormous power. There is talk of restoring them. Whether they will do it, I don’t know. This book is a wonderful diary and very amusing. There are lots of wonderful conversations with people he meets on his journey. Byron is a good travelling companion. It’s fun to travel with him and hear what he has to say, although he is quite a snob. Yes. That’s true when it came to the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Of them, he says: “Neither has any artistic value. But one could bear that; it is their negation of sense, their lack of any pride in their monstrous flaccid bulk, that sickens.” It’s very extreme and I wouldn’t agree with any of that at all. But it’s quite entertaining to read, even though you end up thinking what a frightful snob he is. But the book is a must for anyone thinking of travelling to Afghanistan and that part of the world."

"I recently wrote about this book and hooked what I wrote on what Chatwin said about it – that it was a sacred text – and what Wilfred Thesiger said, which was that it was a lot of nonsense. I think you can reconcile these views. It’s actually why I like the book. It’s sacred nonsense, or Robert Byron is a holy fool, if that makes sense. It’s nonsense because he sort of explodes the usual narrative of the travel book – the narrative itinerary where you go from A to B, B to C and so on. Byron is all over the shop. I think if you read his contents page, it tells you he goes to Tehran seven times and he goes to Persia and then Afghanistan and then back to Persia and then Afghanistan and Persia again and he ends up in India and then he’s back in Wiltshire [in the UK]. So it really is all over the place. So it is nonsensical in that way. But the reason that somebody like Chatwin thought it was sacred was above all because of his looking. This is what Byron does and he’s absolutely brilliant at it. Yes, he’s looking at Islamic architecture. The reason I chose it as one of my five Muslim world travel books, even though he isn’t an Islamicist or Arabist or anything, is because he once said that to travel in the Islamic world is to look at a close cousin. Travelling to India and Tibet he said was to discover a new and wholly unconnected world. So, it’s really the way that he’s looking at Islamic architecture and Islamic rationalism. He is drawing subtle parallels between the place he starts with, which is Venice – he goes to the Veneto and looks at Palladio’s Villa “La Malcontenta”, the masterpiece of Palladian rationalism – and places like Isfahan and the great tomb tower in Iran, and he is covertly making his point that Islam and the West are sharers in this rationalism. And that’s really why I am so inspired by him as someone who travels in the Islamic world and looks at Islamic buildings. It’s why Chatwin called him sacred, I think. He’s sacred, not in a secular sense, but a humanist sense. He’s trying to tease out what makes humans reasonable, rational and capable of producing great works of art. He teases this out beautifully and he draws the parallel that what we have in Europe and what we care about and love so much you can find in the Islamic world also. It’s a tremendously important point. I think it transforms all of us. To a lot of my friends here I’m a horrible old curmudgeon when I’m at home. It blows the cobwebs away when you go travelling. That’s a very important point to make. But something does come across of his outrageous character in his books. If you read his outrageous pronouncements, he is being a bright young thing out to shock. When he’s talking about the Buddhas of Bamiyan he says something like “the massive flaccid bulk that sickens, they are not art and do not even have the dignity of labour”. Rereading this quite recently, I thought maybe the Taliban were secret fans of Robert Byron and they went and blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan. He would have loved that. He was a stirrer. Someone once asked him what he would most like to be and he said “a very beautiful male prostitute with a sting in my bottom”. And it’s the sting in the bottom which I love about the book. At the beginning he says he travels to Persia to get the taste of the Alhambra and the Taj Mahal out of his mouth. There he is demolishing two of the most important buildings in art history. You’ve got to love him because of that. Even though he’s outrageous, his arrows are almost always hitting the mark."

"Oxiana is a coinage of his, and it doesn’t geographically specifically exist. It was a way of saying Persia (as it was to him) and Afghanistan. Byron’s journey starts in Venice and ends in what is now Pakistan. He went there in 1933-34, not long before he died in World War II, drowned when his ship was torpedoed. Although the book is terrifically chauvinistic – he’s appalling when he writes about the local people, almost always without sympathy and sometimes with extreme colonial arrogance – it’s full of wonderful descriptions. It’s rather like what I was saying about building a mosaic about a country. He does that marvellously, in a description of landscape, then a menu, then a conversation, often humorous or sometimes a bit mad, and then some of the finest architectural descriptions in the language. His passion was early Persian architecture. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . That’s certainly one type of travel writer. The Paddy Leigh Fermor tradition, if you like. Byron was a serious art historian. He was a bit of a contrarian, a bit of a rebel. He hated the Omar Khayyám brigade – you know the rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the popular Persian poem translated by Edward Fitzgerald. “Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night / Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight: / And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught / The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.” That sort of thing, very Georgian. And if you read the original, it doesn’t read anything like it, it’s completely different. Robert Bryon mocked this sort of orientalism, he wanted to get to the real thing. It’s an artistic and architectural pilgrimage, if you like. But the scholarship is combined with outrageous, funny interviews with people. In the Persia of the time, you couldn’t speak or write about the Shah openly, so he called him Marjoribanks, a silly name to make fun of pomposities. I don’t know what it means, really. I should think it means gentlemanly attention to scholarship, I dare say often too superficial. It’s the feel of a big literary tradition in the background, and of a slightly mandarin kind of writing. Paddy is certainly very rich in his style, and Byron too can be. I fear that it may suggest a certain superiority. That certainly shows in Byron – not in Leigh Fermor, he’s too generous, but Byron is typical of that post-colonial arrogance. Yes I do. I think that almost all of the travel writers we’re talking about are British public school people. And I think that system had a big effect. I was sent to boarding school at the age of seven. My parents were over in Canada, I was here 3,000 miles away. That sort of thing, for better or worse, makes you very independent ­– both psychologically and even physically. Just having to cope for yourself at that age makes a big difference, and I feel that is quite important in the tradition of travel writing being so British. There are very few other countries that produce the same travel-writing creature, and there’s an awful arrogance about the genre sometimes. But still, such writers have been given the self-confidence to feel that they’re going to be OK, so there’s not that degree of anxiety that so many people have when they’re travelling. You always feel that something is dying, and then you realise that it’s just changed."