REVIEW OF EUROPE IN THE LOOKING GLASS

TOM'S REVIEW

EUROPE IN THE LOOKING GLASS

 by Robert Byron (1926)

EUROPE IN THE LOOKING GLASS is Robert Byron’s account of his travels with two right Charlies, the reckless David and the melancholic Simon, across Europe in the summer of 1925. Robert may be an Eton graduate attending Merton College, Oxford, but he is also a 20 year-old on a road trip in an unreliable car experiencing a rite of passage we’ve all either been on, or wished we had, especially to the places Robert sees at a time when local character and old-world charm did still abide.

Not that Robert much appreciates either. He is quick to scoff at custom, keen to drink more than he can handle and happy to commit acts of petty vandalism. He and his mates are a mash-up of the Bullingdon Club and Dorothy Parker’s Vicious Circle. Robert has high praise for the Sitwell siblings—renowned for their literary, artistic and sexual iconoclasm—and disdain for conventional opinion about almost every city he visits, including Berlin, Munich, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Venice, Florence, Rome and Athens. Not surprisingly, he saves his highest praise for two places not on the traditional tourist map, Ferrara and Revenna. But he also has a precocious appreciation of art and architecture, and he heaps praise on the things he likes, including some that are iconic and time-honored.

Mixed with the Bullingdon Club and the Vicious Circle, though, is a good measure of Beavis and Butthead, namely in the chums’ acumen with routes, car mechanics and relations with locals. David is forever going off-piste onto single-track mountain roads and into dry river beds, where he blows out tires or clogs carburetor jets before receiving help from the local citizenry whom he later pisses off and whose wrath he barely escapes, usually by taking a single-track mountain road that ends in a dry river-bed. But he manages to outdo himself before the trip even begins when, without consulting the most basic travel resource, like a map, he decides that Patras should be the port of destination on the boat ride from Italy to Greece because it just sounds better than Piraeus. Patras in 1924 is a desolate backwater in westernmost Greece, while Piraeus is the port of Athens. Cue calamity: loading the car onto a boat barely bigger than the car in the Italian port of Brindisi; crossing the Ionian in an undersized boat with what must be balsa for ballast; offloading the car in a town with a stevedoring harness Archimedes would have sent to the dump; and discovering that there are no roads from Patras to, well, anywhere. Calamity is a time-honored source of comedy, but I have to draw the line when it’s the product of willful stupidity by Oxbridge Etonians who have the means and connections to avoid any serious consequences. 

While it’s tempting to dismiss this book as a mash-up of BRIDESHEAD REVISITED and DUDE, WHERE’S MY CAR?, this book has stood the test of time, both as a prelude to Byron’s consensus classic THE ROAD TO OXIANA and as a travel book that manages to cross the path of history. For Robert Byron hits Italy during the budding of Fascism, which he dismisses as the post-WWI sour grapes of bitter aristos, thugs and cranks, while not actually condemning it outright. Indeed, he would later befriend the Mitfords and attend the 1938 Nuremberg rally with Unity just as her sister Nancy was hoping for a marriage proposal from Byron that was never going to come (and not because of their political differences). While he did not share the Mitford’s views on the merits of the Third Reich, you might conclude by the company he kept that his antipathy toward Fascism was as tepid in 1938 as it was in 1925. Ironic then that he died in 1941 on a ship torpedoed by a German U-Boat. Or karmic. 

3 stars