NEW EUROPE,
Michael Palin, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $60

I reviewed this title on Radio New Zealand National's Nine to Noon this morning.
Here are my notes which are somewhat more extensive than I had time to use on air.


This is Michael Palin’s seventh book to accompany what have been very successful BBC TV travel series – Around the World in 80 Days, Pole to Pole, Full Circle, Hemingway Adventure, Sahara, and Himalaya.

This latest TV series opened in the UK a couple of weeks back and attracted more than 7.5 million viewers. This I guess isn’t surprising as Himalaya, his previous TV series attracted an average audience of around 9 million per episode, pretty bloody impressive, while the book Himalaya was number one on the UK best-seller non-fiction list for 11 consecutive weeks.

He has developed a winning formula. And if you read this book and in particular his acknowledgements at the end of the book you realize that far from being the one man show that you see on screen there are a dozen or so very key players who make it possible for him to be so effective and appear to be so relaxed. Apart from camera and sound men, and editors and production assistants, a director and producers there are also the three women, very important to the whole process who go ahead of Palin & the others, locate interesting local people, set up the meetings and the stories.

The book in turn is made up from Palin’s hand written journals, which must surely be detailed and extensive, and of course the superb photographs of Basil Pao who has collaborated on all of the travel books.

In this book he travels to twenty countries over the course of 12 months with total filming time just short of six months all to make 7 one hour TV episodes, plus of course the book. The 20 countries are the countries of the old Eastern Europe, of the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia & the former Czechoslovakia several of which are now members of the EU with more having applications to join. Countries like Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic along with Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. And of course the whole of this region is one of pretty recent major turmoil – the breakup of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall while some of these countries were at war with each as recently as 10-15 years ago, some still have uneasy relationships, especially among the Balkan states.

Now I suggest that this book is not for political analysts like you Kathryn as it is all quite fleeting and when you cover 20 countries in 288 pages, pages liberally scattered with gorgeous colour photographs, you are not going to get a lot of detail or serious analysis. But that is one of the things I like about Michael Palin, (one of the most agreeable and amiable fellows I have ever met by the way), he doesn’t pretend to be a journalist or historian or political commentator, he simply writes, and writes very well in a most entertaining manner, about the people he meets, both famous and unknown, and sites and scenes he sees along the journey. He is an interested and interesting traveller, well informed, well read and articulate.

I personally am not especially interested in this region, if you can call such a diverse, culturally rich and complex bunch of nations a region, but Palin covers it in just the right amount of detail for me, enough to satisfy my curiosity, give me sufficient information on each country’s history and a feel for how and where they are going as judged by their own citizenry. If you want more than this, then are plenty of far more serious and detailed books available, start with the list of books he includes in his acknowledgements.

An excellent map at the front of the book shows the route covered and then there are the 200 odd superb photographs.

More of the same really from Michael Palin, but then why would you change a winning formula? Remember too that this man was one of the geniuses behind Monty Python, has written children’s books, film scripts, a play and a novel.
He knows what he is about and he can write.