460 pages, Walker Books, ISBN-13: 978-0802714220
Victoria Clark’s The Far-Farers: A Journey from Viking Iceland to Crusader Jerusalem takes its title is from Thorvald the Far-Farer, the name given an Icelandic Viking from ten centuries ago who converted to Christianity in the 990s, accompanied a missionary bishop and preached the gospel, and even made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. So fascinated by this person was Clark that she decided to do the same 1,000 years on, comparing the preoccupations of today’s Europeans to those of the 11th Century. Cool, huh?
Clark proves to be a plucky far-farer herself, taking a cargo ship from Reykjavik to Lubeck, roughing it on trains and buses in Italy, Albania and Greece, throwing a fit of hysteria to acquire a visa into Syria and getting into Jerusalem a few months before it became a no-go area (the book was original published in 2004). But it isn’t just medieval tourist Thorvald that interests Clark, as she also follows in the footsteps of a plethora of other characters: Adalbert, Duke of Alsace and practically a saint; Otto III, Holy Roman Emperor who was elected when only 16 and died when only 21; Matilda of Tuscany, one of the most capable women ever to rule, then or now; along with a host of Popes pious and perverted, Byzantine Emperors sophisticated and simple, Arab Emirs cultured and cruel, and Christian Crusaders brave and brutal. But this is as much a modern-day travel-log as a trip into the past, and so Clark finds herself helped along the way by an almost equally-interesting assortment of modern characters: an Icelander who has a museum of phalluses; a melancholic East German devoted to magnificently medieval Quedlinburg; ebullient Italians in Bari; an amorous Syrian who chases her round Krak des Chevaliers, the great Crusader castle, and others, besides.
All this is well and good, but what really interests Clark is religion, especially the juxtaposition of its all-encompassing importance in Thorvald’s time with its dramatic decline in Western Europe today. Besides visiting churches, mosques and synagogues and sitting through not one, but two, audiences with Pope John Paul II, she also meets with committed Christians of differing persuasions: a young French monk in the ecumenical Taizé community; the Orthodox Archbishop Yannoulatos; Padre Domenico, a lone Italian priest in Antioch; and Sister Rita, a Palestinian nun. One can’t help but feel that Clark is performing a noble task, by showing oh-so-vividly just how the world has changed in 900-or-so years, both for better and for worse. But the trouble is that Clark seems to have cooked up a Grand Universal Theory before her journey and is hell-bent on proving that the 11th Century “laid the essential groundwork for the rest of the second millennium with its eventual removal of religion from its central place”. Proving this leads to labored links, unconvincing parallels and ostrich-like reactions to the many intelligent thinkers she meets who, with remarkable courtesy, totally (and repeatedly) disagree with her.
But the moral that Clark imposes on her journey is not what makes this book so fascinating, but rather the journey itself. Stuffed with funny and almost photographically vivid portraits of the citizens of modern Europe and interwoven with startling brief lives of a clutch of formidable men and women from the past, it makes one realize just how alike humans of every time and place can be to one another, and if that isn’t a Kumbaya moment I don’t know what is.
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