Warwick

Writing a five-star review full of superlatives is always difficult: for people who haven’t read it yet, there’s no way any book can live up to the kind of praise that someone who loves it wants to give out. And so I really need to marshall my thoughts here, because I genuinely believe that Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is one of the three or four greatest books published in the twentieth century, and I want to make sure I present my case as well as I can. (I say ‘three or four’ just to cover myself – in the privacy of a personal conversation I’d have to admit that personally there’s nothing I’d rate over this.) This is going to be a long review, because I want to quote her in detail.

First of all, let’s acknowledge what a daunting prospect it is. Let’s be honest, eleven hundred pages about the Balkans sounds unpromising, and personally I doubt I would ever have read it unless I’d been travelling to Serbia and Monetenegro myself. Recommending it to people isn’t always easy, because it is certainly big, and it does contain some longueurs – but somehow they become part of its genius. There are some masterpieces which appear to be flawless, the writing of which I cannot even understand – Nabokov’s Pale Fire is one. But then there are other great works whose imperfections seem to be an intrinsic part of what makes them great, and Black Lamb is of that kind. I can understand how it was written, but the sheer depth of thinking involved staggers me.

It’s important to say what it’s not. People who criticise this book sometimes say that its politics are biased, or that recent historiography renders West’s theories about the Byzantine Empire obsolete. This is at best beside the point. The book is not a history, or a political tract: it’s a travel journal, which just happens to involve some deep thinking in several important areas. (Claims that she is ‘anti-German’ are particularly absurd – West and her husband were huge lovers of German culture. What they disliked was Germany’s political environment in the 1930s, which anyone would have to admit is fair enough.)

On the sentence-by-sentence level, her writing is exceptional in its clarity and its striking imagery, by turns witty and beautiful. ‘She was one of those widows whose majesty makes their husbands seem specially dead’, she says of one woman; and of another, ‘It is true that she was plump as an elephant, but she was so beautiful that the resemblance only served to explain what it is that male elephants feel about female elephants.’ On another occasion, after a long description of Orthodox priests chanting hymns, she concludes with extraordinary sensitivity:

If there be a God who is fount of all goodness, this is the tribute that should logically be paid to Him; if there be only goodness, it is still a logical tribute.

I melt over her description of the Islamic call to prayer:

It is a cry that holds an ultimate sadness, like the hooting of owls and the barking of foxes in night-time. The muezzins are making that plain statement of their cosmogony, and the owls and foxes are obeying the simplest need for expression; yet their cries, which they intended to mean so little, prove more conclusively than any argument that life is an occasion which justifies the hugest expenditure of pity.

What is most striking for a modern reader is how blindingly direct Rebecca is. Nowadays it’s customary for a lot of writers to distance themselves from controversial views by using disingenuous constructions like ‘Some people might say that…’ or ‘it could be argued that…’ or ‘one might suggest that…’. There is none of that here: she decides what she thinks about an issue, and says it in the most forceful way she can. Some people have taken this to mean that she has a black-and-white view of the world, but to my mind that is a disastrous misreading. Rebecca West’s understanding is very subtle, she just believes that the best way to advance an argument is to state it in its strongest form. For example, she doesn’t agree with the Islamic practice of veiling women – but she says it like this:

The veil perpetuates and renews a moment when man, being in league with death, like all creatures that must die, hated his kind for living and transmitting life, and hated woman more than himself, because she is the instrument of birth, and put his hand to the floor to find filth and plastered it on her face, to affront the breath of life in his nostrils.

It’s extremely refreshing and challenging to read arguments presented in this way. You won’t always agree with her – often you’ll disagree strongly – but you are always engaged with the prose, a two-way conversation, either yelling out in agreement or leaping out of your chair with objections. She is a visceral writer. But at this point, let me digress slightly into

A PERSONAL INTERLUDE

In the mid-2000s, I found myself lodging with a gay sexagenarian Baron who worked at a Tunbridge Wells bookshop. His baronial title had been inherited from Belgian relatives, he drank a lot of blended scotch, and he was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. His entire house was full of books: they went from floor to ceiling in every room of the house, including the kitchen and the stairwells. A man after my own heart.

One day as we sat sipping whisky, I told him that I’d just started reading the most incredible book: ‘Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, I don’t know if you know of it….’ Nick jolted up in his chair. ‘What was that? What did you say? You’re reading Rebecca West? Well that’s – gosh. I knew her, you know….’

It turned out that she had officially opened the secondhand bookshop he used to own, and they had corresponded for a while; he’d even gone up to London with his boyfriend to have dinner with her a few times. ‘I only wish someone had Boswellized her,’ he said to me on several occasions: she was, apparently, even more brilliant and acerbic in real life than she was on paper. One of the things he pointed out to me was how extremely rare it was for a publisher to agree to bring out such a huge book on such an obscure topic in the middle of the war, during paper rationing: ‘In the end they just thought it was of such extraordinary quality that they made an exception.’

So delighted was my landlord to find that someone thirty years younger than him was enjoying this book, that when I left he pulled a 1942 first edition of it, in two volumes, from his shelves, and gave it to me as a parting gift. I kept it open on my desk as I read, and used the Canongate version for scribbling in.

THE REVIEW, CONCLUDED

It is rare to find a travel book that builds a cumulative argument, let alone an argument that can be sustained over more than a thousand pages. Ultimately what makes Black Lamb so astonishing for me is that Rebecca West uses the gifts I outlined above to probe the depths of the human condition in a very clear-sighted way. To end this review I want to look at these arguments a bit more closely – if you want to discover them for yourself, you could consider what follows to be spoilers. As West travels, Europe is on the edge of war: as she publishes, the killing is well underway. What makes humans behave like this?

It’s the sort of grandiose question that usually gets grandiose, evasive answers. But not here. West thinks long and hard about it and she is characteristically blunt in her conclusions. For her there is a systemic problem with the Christianity that underpins western culture, simply because it’s built on the idea of a human sacrifice, and that leaves us fundamentally unsure about right and wrong.

We are continually told to range ourselves with the crucified and the crucifiers, with innocence and guilt, with kind love and cruel hate. Our breasts echo for ever with the cries ‘In murdering goodness we sinned’ and ‘By murdering goodness we were saved.’ ‘The lamb is innocent and must not be killed,’ ‘The dead lamb brings us salvation,’ so we live in chaos.

She goes further than this, though. (She always goes further.) When, in Macedonia, West witnesses a lamb being sacrificed in real life, she grasps that this internal chaos mentioned above has very dark consequences for human society and conflict; indeed, for civilised nations this is a paradox that can make us want to be defeated, even when – especially when – fighting for a good cause.

We believed in our heart of hearts that life was simply this and nothing more, a man cutting the throat of a lamb on a rock to please God and obtain happiness; and when our intelligence told us that the man was performing a disgusting and meaningless act, our response was not to dismiss the idea as a nightmare, but to say, ‘Since it is wrong to be the priest and sacrifice the lamb, I will be the lamb and be sacrificed by the priest.’ We thereby set up a principle that doom was honourable for innocent things, and conceded that if we spoke of kindliness and recommended peace it was fitting that afterwards the knife should be passed across our throats. Therefore it happened again and again that when we fought well for a reasonable cause and were in sight of victory, we were filled with a sense that we were not acting in accordance with divine protocol, and turned away and sought defeat, thus betraying those who had trusted us to win them kindliness and peace.

The implications of this extraordinary passage, when it comes to war, are fully explored. West hates war, but she also hates ‘the fatuousness of such pacifism as points out the unpleasantness of war as if people had never noticed it before’.

That non-resistance paralyses the aggressor is a lie: otherwise the Jews of Germany would all be very well today.

Some causes are worth fighting for, even though doing so feels abhorrent. As far as I’m concerned, this insight has never been better expressed:

I had to be willing to fight for it even though my own cause could not fail to be repulsive to me, since the essence of civilization was disinclination to violence, and when I defended it habit would make me fear that I was betraying it.

This is the meaning of the book’s title, drawn from a Serbian fable about religious sacrifice. In the global conflict erupting around her, Rebecca West could see emerging the same impulses and psychological currents that she had been studying and thinking about for years, ebbing and flowing throughout history and crystallised in the story of Yugoslavia: because human beings are a species that have evolved just enough intelligence to know that what we do is terrible, but not enough to go beyond it; and that leaves us unable to fight for our better nature with conviction.

For we have developed enough sensibility to know that to be cruel is vile, and therefore we would not wish to be the priest whose knife made the blood spurt from the black lamb’s throat; and since we still believed the blood sacrifice to be necessary we were left with no choice, if we desired a part in the service of the good, but to be the black lamb.

I know of no other book that thinks this hard or this deeply, and where depth of thought is combined with such felicity of expression – and that’s without even considering the fact that it was written from within the heart of the maelstrom itself. Following West’s train of thought through this doorstop-sized essay is one of the biggest intellectual trips you can get from picking up a book, and everyone who can cope with the experience deserves to have it. To my mind, Black Lamb is simply unique – a thing of joy and beauty, a peerless example of applied brilliance, a dazzling masterpiece.