Music

Canongate has done Rebecca West proud with this handsome reissue of her most famous work, first published in 1942. It’s part travelogue, part memoir, part epic narrative history of the former Yugoslavia, and it entrances the reader for the duration of its 1,200-page span, despite being full of digressions and ruminations on, among much else, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and why Serb children who grow up in towns are ‘weakly’. (It’s because they are kept indoors during the winter and fed too much meat, apparently.)

Actually, as Geoff Dyer explains in an introduction so brilliant it reduces the reviewer to helpless quotation, ‘Black Lamb and Grey Falcon’ has two subjects: Yugoslavia, and everything else. Although regarded as a great writer, West has traditionally been excluded from the first rank because her greatness manifested itself in reportage and travel writing: ‘Palpably inferior works – novels – sit far more securely on the literary syllabus than an awkward tome whose identifying quality is a refusal to fit,’ Dyer points out, concluding that the book is ‘a kind of metaphysical Lonely Planet that never requires updating’.

Tense with the threat of imminent violence, ‘Black Lamb’ anticipates the wars of the 1990s as much as it does World War II, which was brewing as West made her initial trips to Serbia and Macedonia in 1936 on a British Council lecture tour. ‘Hey, Croat!’ shouts her driver Dragutin to a young soldier posted in Serbia. ‘ “You’re a brave fellow. How do you like us Serbs?” “Very well, very well!” he answered smiling. “Everybody is kind to me here, and I had thought you were my enemies.” “Eyah!” said Dragutin, twisting the lobe of the boy’s ear, “We’ll kill you all some day.” The boy wriggled and laughed …’

For up-to-date insights into the region’s political and psychological geography, Tony White’s ‘Another Fool in the Balkans’ (Cadogan £8.99), subtitled ‘In the Footsteps of Rebecca West’, is a good place to start.