My career as an armchair traveler was hampered, in my younger years, by a complete willingness to enter into any world – real or fake – by its own terms. This was done with an innocent understanding of books as completely separate things, unrelated to this reality at all except as portals to get us out of it and into another a little more interesting. This, coupled with a dedicated ignorance of geography which defies imagination, kept me well grounded between two covers whenever reading of foreign nations and daring expeditions.{{1}}[[1]]It did not, somehow, keep me from assuming I would one day visit the Crystal Palace and see all those nice little exhibitions. Time can be a dangerous place to travel through casually.[[1]]

 

I think it was G. A. Henty’s The Young Carthaginian which finally birthed the inkling of an idea that some places in fiction could be traveled to physically as well as mentally. Trying to work out the passage of elephants across the atlas, I started in surprise to see such well known names all bunched together on the page, patiently awaiting my discovery. It wasn’t that I had thought them to be fake – not Switzerland, certainly, nor Scandinavia, France, Siberia, or any or them really.  It was more that the implications of their existence hadn’t ever quite occurred to me. All things in books are equally real while read, and so I lived as if they were all equally inconsequential when not. More than just being wrong, I found that by treating place names as pertinent only to the stories they were in I had twisted the globe into an impossible shape, where countries never touch or always touched, grew to grandiose dimensions or diminished into obscurity, depending on what I happened to be reading. The real world, I knew instantly then, was no such malleable thing, and the position of the different lines on the atlas was as important to the stories as anything else. They in fact informed, and were themselves informed by, not just the stories I read, but the story behind them – the greater tale known as history.

I wonder if I would have discovered all this a little bit sooner if I had read The Princess Passes as a child. Probably not – the rich, descriptive language used to describe impossible mountains and awful precipices would have made the story seem a fairytale, unspoiled by truth. But older now, and grounded both in the conviction that this world is more miraculous than any fairyland and the knowledge that the authors had motored through that part of the world themselves, and so could describe it firsthand, I am fully able to appreciate this book both as a well-written story and a window into a part of the world I might one day go.

Well written, of course, is one of those phrases which is tossed around for a number of reasons, and hardly tells anyone anything unless they already know it and agree. What I mean by it most times is that the use of language is exquisite. A book can be well put together, well executed, even well done without ever having achieved that best praise of all, well worded. Here that praise can be honestly given, for from Paris to Monte Carlo the scenery is painted with a fanciful, technicolored brush, sometimes to evoke a laugh sometimes a wishful sigh, but always to make us feel we know exactly how it would appear if we were standing on that balcony, or trudging along that narrow ridge.

Since I have been so obviously taken by the form, I will let you form your own opinion of the content. If I enjoyed it, I enjoyed it as a whole with the book and would consider it dull, if not a little insulting, to annex it merely to weigh and measure its many parts. I do have a particular soft spot for our main traveling companion, who fit neatly into the mold of most of my childhood heroes and produced such delightful metaphors – even now I can see rose petals falling softly onto the snowy mountain tops. Admittedly, part of my sympathy for the hero comes from Grant Hurlock’s excellent vocals, which gave serious dignity to such otherwise ethereal apparitions as lakes of melted emeralds and lapis lazuli skies. The other elements of the story, the plot and cast, are average and can be well summed up in the phrase “Shakperean rom-com.” Yes, it’s a romance, and it does get a bit treacly near the end.

When you find a book whose use of words elevates it above nice to truly good, and has a subject matter worthy of its efforts, it is hard to resist quoting it to all your friends. Luckily for us all, my memory is artlessly awful, especially when drawn from dictation, so if you too would like the sensation of visiting the alps without having to board a plane, you can find the audio recording of the book here.