Product Description

THERE IS NOT much to say about this book by way of introduction. It describes an undeservedly successful attempt to travel overland from Peking in China to Kashmir in India. The journey took seven months and covered about 3,500 miles...With masterly understatement Peter Fleming begins this account of what is one of the true epics of adventure. With his companion, Eva Maillart, and motivated largely by curiosity, they set out across a China torn by civil war to journey through Sinkiang to British India. It had been eight years since a traveller had crossed Sinkiang; in between times those who had entered this inhospitable and politically volatile area seldom left alive. This, China's most westerly province, was under the control of a rebel warlord supported by Stalin's Red Army. Within it there was yet further civil war and the southern oases through which Fleming and Maillart had to travel were under the control of yet another rebel force. Entering the province by a little known and almost lethal route and following the path of the Silk Road, they ended up in Kashgar before crossing the Pamirs to India. Beautifully written and superbly observed, this is not simply a superb account of a part of the world few of us will ever see, but also a marvellous insight into the last days of the Great Game, when Britain and Russia still faced each other across a Central Asia in a state of anarchy. It is a magnificent travelogue by one of the last and greatest adventures of Empire.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #61344 in Books
• Published on: 2001-11-23
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 394 pages

Review
'Its entertainment value is immense. It will arouse great fury and cause much pleasure - an epic of adventure' - Harold Nicolson 'It confirmed Fleming's place in the front rank of travel writers... no modern work of travel has given me more pleasure... I have read it more times than I can remember' Daily Telegraph

About the Author
PETER FLEMING, THE brother of Ian Fleming, was born in 1907. After a stint on the Spectator as a literary editor he had his first taste of adventure on a trip to South America in the early 1930s. He travelled widely in China during the 1930s, where he reported on the civil war there. During World War II he was involved in intelligence operations around the world. During the 1950s and 1960s he produced a string of works of popular history. He died in 1971.

Customer Reviews

News from Tartary
Peter Fleming, brother of Ian, undertakes an audacious expedition in 1935 across an area of the world deep in revolutionary termoil.
His only companion "Kini" (Ella Maillart), shares in the journey which is an example of the eccentric travellers of the day. They wanted to do it because everyone said it was impossible to travel from China to India.
Written in an easy and readable style it manages to be more than a copy of his diary and you can share in some of the trials and tribulations they experience.
They use the cover of "The Times Special Correspondant" to pay for the expedition and travel "light" to ease the pressures of gaining pack animals.
From the start of the book on a train on the Hankow-Peking railway to the final canter on horseback to pick up the car at Banipur the length of the journey is easily conveyed.
Fleming illustrates the problems he has crossing provincial boundaries within China; the frustrations from local Warlords intervention; the bribes they have to pay; the staff they have to hire to protect themselves; the friends they have to abandon for their own safety; the pack animals they buy, use and watch suffer at certain points on the journey.
In his description of Sinkiang he delivers a picture of a confused state where the biggest bully in the area holds all the cards. An area where the U.S.S.R. and China fight for political influence.
In all this chaos walled cities and large caravans are required to maintain the safety of people and goods from bandits and rampaging warlords.
The fact that these two people succeed is as much down to their patience as their perseverence, because of the frustrations and hardships they suffer.

A Forgotten Classic?
This book ranks with Byron's 'The Road to Oxiana', Burnaby's 'A Ride to Khiva', Cherry-Garrard's 'Worst Journey..', and anything by Raban, Theroux and the current new pretenders as a classic of travel writing. The plot is simple. Fleming and Ella Maillart travel from Peking via Sian into Sinkiang (i.e. Tartary - the year is 1935) and thence through the Himalayas to India. The adventures are to do with inter-war politics and travel-on-a-budget. The physical beauty of the countryside, its harshness, the enduringly difficult nature of the terrain and the people are sparingly but vividly drawn out. The tone is anti-sentimental, laconic, deliberately flat. Fleming comes across as a quintissential English Hero (which is exactly what he was before WW2 bought travel to millions and redefined heroism).

The book runs on two levels. There is the straight travel narrative, written sparingly and with a good feel for the rhythms, both psychological and physical, of such a journey. Then there is the acerbic, slightly cynical, amused, and detached commentary on the action and the actors - the author being harder on himself than any of the other characters that we meet along the way.

If there is a flaw in this great book it is that in the end it is not quite what it says on the side of the tin. This book is NOT really News from Tartary - the news as the author well knows is really an excuse for making the trip rather than the reason for it - but it is also not quite a travel narrative pure and simple. The author's own detached attitude ends up making the reader similary detatched, uninvolved in the trip itself, and more interested in the author than the road.

But I urge you to go read this book.

A Dryly Hilarious Restless Young Man
What the other reviewer meant by saying that it was definitely not a timeless classic is bewildering, for it is a timeless classic, one I make time to reread regularly. I love Robert Byron too, but Fleming is so immediate, full of perfect crystalline writing, crisp comedy, and the most wonderful sensibility. Intrepidity, intelligence, and wit decorate a journey through heartless landscapes.