Ghostly traces of a vanished land

This is an entirely pointless but curiously engaging and even tantalising book. A youthful love affair in Montreal with a girl of Latvian descent plants the word ‘Courland’ in the author’s mind. He finds it mellifluous and somehow magical. The girl’s beauty and otherworldliness add a sense of mystery. An Alsatian cousin whose father, drafted into the Wehrmacht, had been killed there in 1945, prompts darker reflection. The discovery that a workmate at the Paris paper he works for is a descendant of the legendary Duchess of Dino, granddaughter of the last of the Dukes of Courland, introduces an intriguing note of nostalgia for a lost elegance.

Without really understanding why, he is gradually drawn into undertaking a frustrating trip to this mythical land in order to write a magazine article which, appropriately, never gets published. What he encounters there is both a dead-end, a toe-hold at the periphery of Europe which does not appear to lead anywhere, and, more surprisingly, a point of departure in the other direction. It was from Windau, now Ventspils, that ships sailed to establish a slaving station in the Gambia river and to set up a colony on Tobago. It was after a service attended by Tsar Nicholas II in the Orthodox chapel of the now abandoned imperial naval base at Karosta that Admiral Rozhestvensky set forth in 1904 on a seven-and-a-half month voyage that ended with the destruction

of the Russian fleet by the Japanese navy at Tsushima. And it was from Dundaga, a little further north, that the man on whom Crocodile Dundee was based emigrated to Australia.