Reading Robert Carver - The Accursed Mountains - Albania

Reading Robert Carver’s (I know, he’s thrilled just to see his name) _The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania_ (Murray, 1998).

Well, I have to agree with the general consensus on this one.  Carver approached the country with studied scepticism that determined his writing before he even opened his notebook.

It may be that much has changed in Albania between when Carver was there in the mid-90s and I was there around 2010, but I doubt that the change can have been all that huge.  Besides, if you read Carver, he will tell you that the country was never not and could never not be in a state of complete tribal chaos and corrupt political intrigue from start to finish, so . . . .

I think the travel books that tell you to steer clear of Carver are right, but still it’s worth reading Carver for his (distorted, snotty, public school) portraits of individuals, and his notations of other characters now gone.

What debilitates Carver most of all is his unironic stance and his lack of humour; these prevent him from gaining comprehension.  For example, I would say that Albanians are honest and helpful and hospitable, and I really—despite what is in his book—doubt that Carver would argue otherwise.  Yes, it is a corrupt society and so forth, but what one isn’t?  It’s a matter of learning the rules, and Carver, in very short pants when it comes to travel, can’t grasp as much.  It wouldn’t matter if _The Daily Telegraph_ had sent Carver to Mars; he ought to have been able to have a look around at the situation and adjust himself accordingly.  Sadly, nothing in his training or background had prepared him to meet other humans on their own terms.

Carver is essentially at war with himself.  There are bits of scenery, bits of girls, bits of values that he glimpses in Albania and that attract him.  Still, though, it’s a hopelessly backward place (you can’t sell books if you can’t make it grotty).  And yet he’s the great fearless (and here is does get a bit comical--~British~ intrepid man in the mountains—sometimes, you really want to say to him, ‘er, Roderick, I say old chap, do you not think you could just throw a rock, maybe?’).  Carver’s estimation of *his* importance to Albanians is just constantly comically completely out of whack.  He tries to pitch his narrative as a dangerous journey into a fearsome land populated by bumbling diplomats behind urban barricades while he sallies out red-eyed into the hinterlands, but. . .for Christ’s sake, come off it—who but a Brittwit toff would really, in a million years, think that his skinny white ass meant anything to any Albanian??  Good lord.  People—the British are still hard-up to find out—have other things on their minds than (hate to say it) Brits. 

But that’s the problem of Carver’s narrative.  He _has_ to pitch himself as an intrepid daredevil.  But he regards all those around him as sycophantic, lazy, useless scum.  He regards the country as utterly primeval, but, to buttress his sense of himself as a conquistador, he must allow himself magnificent moments in which he, say, sees a moon rise over a mountain, and he exults, “Imagine, I was the first man since Columbus to see. . .” or “I was the first Westerner to penetrate. . .” or “Not since WWII had a foreigner. . .”.  I mean, really, Roderick.  Maybe shooting tied-down rabbits was your vocation, after all.

It’s a pretty foolish book, and one that Carver is probably pretty embarrassed about now.  He was probably operating on the age-old imperial schema he’d imbibed in his youth, that, so long as no-one finds out what you’re up to, you can say whatever you want.  He couldn’t see the future because the past had dictated to him what he’d write in the present.

But I’m not lying—I read the book.  At first, I was amused by his faux-Greene (Carver himself would admit this) weary cynicism and the characters he introduced me to.  Increasingly, though, as he continued his travels, and went to places I’ve been to, too, I found myself reading to hear about him, though not in the way he’d intended (the intrepid traveller).  I started to read through him, and see his attempts to make himself seem bold and uncanny as silly or tired.  Carver’s book is predicated on a north-to-south terrible adventure, but even he apparently tired of that and gave in to petulant phrases when it became apparent that those were all he’d be able to work himself up to.  Give him another 150 pages, I say, and this turns right into Pickwick in the Balkans.  It would have been bloody hilarious, seeing him either attempting to sustain his Bond-ish persona or keep on mustering evil amongst peasants for whom evil was much less interesting than a bowl of yoghurt.

z-r