Three Answers: Rory Stewart

by Staff, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 6/26/2006

Three Answers today are from Rory Stewart, whose The Places in Between was published last month by Harvest Books.

PW: Your book describes your walk across Afghanistan in 2002, which was part of a longer walk through four other Asian countries. What possessed you to undertake such a potentially dangerous journey?

RS: Every time I try to answer that question I come up with these complicated motivational statements about my family, or about the fact that I love walking, or the fact that I grew up in Asian cities and have always been very interested in villages. I think underlying all of this was a strong sense that this would be an adventure. At the same time, as a diplomat and foreign service officer, I was genuinely fascinated by the politics of these countries emerging from war. And I also wanted to prove, in a sense, that this journey was doable. I had a strong instinct that it could be done—or I wouldn't have set off—because in fact rural communities in Afghanistan are incredibly generous and welcoming. And I wanted to demonstrate to the government institutions I'd worked with, who no longer allow their personnel to travel except heavily defended, that it isn't all this terrifying, incredibly dangerous world out there. That in fact the world is full of people who are generally, in most circumstances, hospitable and decent.

PW: Was there any point in your Afghanistan walk where you had second thoughts?

RS: I became aware that I had probably taken too much risk. The reason I stopped when I got to Kabul was that I realized halfway across Afghanistan that I would be very lucky to make it, and that if I did I owed it to my parents and my family to stop. I think my main worry was about my own ability to keep going. I had a very disturbing moment halfway across Afghanistan where I basically sat down in the snow after a long day when I was very sick. I became very, very close to just giving up—almost embracing it, almost feeling at that stage I'd done enough, that there was no point. I had just come across a dead body of a man who died crossing the snow plain in the other direction, probably three days before me. And of course I became aware of the danger: when I got into some trouble with a Taliban group south of Kabul I was reminded how very much some of these communities had against British and American people.

PW: Which was tougher, the walking or the writing?

RS: For somebody who spent the best part of two years walking 20–25 miles a day almost every day, outside eight or nine hours a day—to suddenly be in Scotland, penned in the library writing all day, was a very strange experience. I'm very serious about reading books, and therefore I'm very neurotic about whether I'm meeting the kinds of standards I want to meet. So much of what I've done in this book is trying to get away from travel books, which I generally don't like. Partly, I think, because I've grown up living abroad, I'm very suspicious of writers going to other people's countries and producing very slick, funny, charming, glamorous, erudite versions of the travel experience. I personally find the experience of being in a foreign country actually to be often perplexing, sometimes frustrating, sometimes boring. I'm struggling to try to convey the realities: I want to ensure that readers realize that often, although I speak Dari, I'm misunderstanding what people are saying to me. I want to convey Afghanistan as a contemporary society, one in which people very often are not very interested in the kind of histories that have been written. And I want to convey the politics and the violence and also the drabness of village life. I think overall the challenge has been trying to convey the sense of what it was actually like without romanticizing it, while at the same time making it interesting.