Of the travel book form, but, one may say, its apotheosis.

In two almost incredibly full-packed volumes one of the most gifted and searching of modern English novelists and critics has produced not only the magnification and intensification 'Black Lamb and Grey Falcon' bears the travel-book subtitle of 'A Journey Through Yugoslavia,' and it follows with consummate success the travel-book formula of history and description and characterization on a thread of personal experience.īut it is safe to say that as a travel book it is unique. It is part - the distilled spiritual essence - of what may be accurately described as a most brilliantly objective travel book although the travels are most significant for their observation of history. This may seem remote and recondite, but it is not. And slaveryĬlosed down upon the Balkan peoples - no legend here, but history - for 500 years. He and his soldiers died vainly on that consecrated but disastrous battlefield.

Its oncoming enemy 'all was holy and honorable' within him, but like the celebrants of false sacrifice, he had set death before life. For the king chose piety and immolation instead of the effective defense of Christian civilization against Not less but more tragic when man identifies himself with the false altar's hapless victim rather than with its cruel priest. The black lamb is the symbol, seen in a gypsy rite in Macedonia, of false - and thus of impious - sacrifice and the terrible complexity of the choice between good and evil becomes Of modern pacifism and points to its tragic results. He gray falcon is an enigmatic figure in a Slav folksong about a military defeat in the year 1389 and it offered the Serbian king a choice which expresses the sad dilemma OctoRebecca West's Brilliant Mosaic of Yugoslavian Travel By KATHERINE WOODS Rebecca West's Brilliant Mosaic of Yugoslavian Travel

Black lamb and gray falcon