The Broken Road, by Patrick Leigh Fermor – review

Sound the trumpets. Let rip the Byzantine chorus of clattering bells and gongs, the thunder of cannons, drums and flashing Greek fire. Raid cellars and let champagne corks fly. Eighty years after Patrick Leigh Fermor’s epic trudge across Europe, 20 years after the death of his long-suffering publisher Jock Murray, ten years after the passing of his wife Joan, and two years after his own death, the elusive third volume that so tormented him is published at last. The travel trilogy is complete. It is, as John Murray reminds us, the literary event of the year. But for those who admire Paddy’s densely beautiful prose, can this awkward, unformed orphan live up to its billing?

There is no need to rehearse the extraordinary genesis and gestation of its predecessors, A Time of Gifts, published in 1977, the small matter of four decades after the walk, and Between the Woods and the Water (1986), both classics of 20th-century travel writing.