In Alexander’s Footsteps

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 29004, 19 September 1959, Page 3

In Alexander’s Footsteps

Alexander’s Path. By Freya Stark. John Murray, 283 pp.

Student, scholar, hospital nurse, factory manager, political officer, traveller, and writer—Freya Stark has been all these, holding an honourable position in the hierarchy of Middle-East travellers, among such as Lady Hester Stanhope. A. W. Kinglake and C. M. Doughty. In her latest book she moves westward into Turkey, following the path of Alexander the Great, in an attempt to explain the significance of that monarch's friendship with the Queen of Caria, and the hidden motives for his march through the Anatolian coastlands. Thus, not only do we have a modern and up-to-date travel book, but an excursion into the realms of historical detection. However, the book falls between two stools. For the scholar it is too chatty, with too manywide generalisations and not enough real proof, while for the general reader, there is too much attempted scholarship and not enough description of present-day conditions and manners for it to be a satisfactory book of travel. Split in this way. the book too often becomes tedious and wearisome.

On the other hand, there are some very fine passages of descriptive writing indeed, which not only describe places as they are today, but bring them vitally alive as scenes of famous incidents of antiquity. There is no doubt that Freya Stark is most certainly mistress of her own particular style—a style as undeniably feminine as C. M. Doughty’s is so gloomily masculine—but she never seems really at home in “Alexander’s Path." Perhaps she is too far from the land she really knows, perhaps the scholar has got the better of the writer; the fact remains however, that although the book is interesting to browse through, entertaining to read in bits, and a delight to handle (thanks to John Murray), it becomes a little taxing to read it from cover to cover.