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Xanadu: Marco Polo and Europe's discovery of the East by John Man
One suspects that JOHN MAN would quite like to have met Marco Polo, who, although relegated to the subtitle, is the real subject of this, Man's latest latest history cum travelogue. Marco Polo was a pioneer (and Herodotus aside, perhaps the pioneer) of the genre in which Man has proven so adept.
And although Man indeed pays a visit to the Xanadu of the title, or (more exactly) Shangdu, Kublai Khan's summer capital, the city of Coleridge's "stately pleasure dome", Man tries to match his thirteenth-century predecessor's footprints as closely as possible and revels in an almost palpable companionship with a kindred spirit. Man appears more than a little fond of Marco, going out of his way to argue that Marco had a special someone in China whose memory lingered long after his return to Venice: the romantic in him clearly wishes it to be true.
This personalization of the past is Man's particular narrative strength. XANADU: MARCO POLO AND EUROPE'S DISCOVERY OF THE EAST, like his other books from Atilla to Ghenghis Khan, is hardly a straightforward treatment: this is neither an introduction, nor a definitive treatment, of any subject in particular, but rather a personal exploration to which we, the readers, have graciously been invited (even to point of requesting us for assistance with regard to missing pieces of information). Xanadu should not be the first book one reads on either Marco Polo or Kublai Khan, but anyone who has ever read about either is likely to find Man's contribution to the subject enjoyable, titillating and fascinating.
Man must by necessity deal with many issues that have been raised elsewhere, such as whether Marco Polo actually went to China at all, and takes pains to demonstrate that he did and knock down the arguments to contrary (in case you are wondering, Marco Polo, or perhaps his prison cell-mate ghostwriter, was not above making things up). Much of this is well-trodden by now.
But then after several chapters of straightforward, if pleasant, narration, Man decides he needs to model Marco Polo's "cane palace", which became, via poetic license, the "stately pleasure dome", but which no one had apparently yet explained. Man ropes in an architectural firm and, much architectural and engineering discussion later, come up with an impressive design based largely on bamboo. This is all rather fun, and one needs to resist the temptation to peak ahead to the colour plates where the solution is given. Without giving the game away, it looks like a very large gazebo.
Man's backpacker-like avoidance of contemporary slickness and pseudo-academic posturing, especially when combined with his erudition and hands-on approach to solving historical questions, is endearing and keeps the pages turning, but it's an approach that works less well with colour plates (some of which would appear to have put together on a desktop graphics package -- the drop shadows are a dead giveaway) and occasionally results in an over-reliance on the Internet: I'm not really up on my medieval Genoese dialect, but the Internet-sourced translation of an anti-Venetian ditty seems to take certain poetic license.
But after all is said and done, and after Man recounts Marco Polo's well-known journey to China and return home, one is left marveling at the serendipity of it all: that Polo's father and uncles made it all the way to Kublai's court the first time, brought Marco back with them, that they thrived for almost two decades in that utterly alien environment, that Marco hit it off with the Great Khan, that they returned, and that Marco turned out to have a prodigious memory, was a good raconteur and ended up in a Genoese prison with just the right person to get it all written down. For all we -- and JOHN MAN -- might wish that Marco Polo had been a bit more accurate and definitive, that his ghost-writer had been a little-less attuned to the market for exotic tales, that - indeed - Marco Polo had been a modern researcher rather than a 13th-century merchant, it is amazing that we have anything at all.
And at a time when each week seems to see the release of yet another wide-eyed, breathless account by a latter-day merchant turned writer, claiming to have discovered China's potential and generously explaining China's mystery to the rest of us, XANADU: MARCO POLO AND EUROPE'S DISCOVERY OF THE EAST is a timely reminder that this story was first written more than seven-hundred years ago, and rather better than many of the more modern efforts.
Peter Gordon
15/01/2010
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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