Out of Steppe [Paperback]

Daniel writes with sparkle, wit, pace and insight and as such the book is an agreeable read that avoids the usual hook followed by travel writers in Central Asia, of following the Silk Road. Instead Daniel chooses to visit less travelled places, to discover some of the lesser-known peoples of the region. He speaks some Farsi and Russian, which help him in his travels, and has clearly researched his subject well.
All this makes for a great read in terms of Daniel's travels, but left me a little disappointed with his actual destinations. His interaction with these minority people's is fleeting and superficial at best, given that this is a road trip and one where there is little time to understand much more than a sound-byte from each region. As such, stereotyping creeps in. When Daniel visits the ground floor of the Nukus museum in Karakalpakstan, his focus is on the moth-eaten taxidermy - all that remains of the region's once-flourishing wildlife. It's all part of a picture he builds of ecological disaster, grimness and depression. And yet, the first-floor of the museum contains one of the largest and most extensive collections of Avant Garde art in the former Soviet Union in a place where the arts flourished, far from Moscow's censorious gaze. Daniel doesn't make it to the first floor or to the most successful private secondary school in the whole country, which is also in Nukus.
I found myself wanting to know more about the year or so Daniel spent in Tehran, learning Farsi and interacting with local students, than his whistle-stop tour of -stans. He's a great writer and I hope that future books will be less about the journey and more about the destination.

a truly fascinating book about people, cultures and landscapes you rarely hear of, telling the good and the bad and the horrible in equal measure

Daniel Metcalfe has clearly steeped himself in the works of earlier generations of British writers on the wildly romantic realm of Central Asia - Robert Byron at the outset, Colin Thubron and Geoffrey Moorhouse in the middle years, and Jason Elliot and Rory Stewart in more recent times. Unfortunately he doesn't quite live up to their standards, as either a writer or a traveller.

Out of Steppe is by no means a bad book; it just isn't very original or very striking. It was received with a remarkable amount of praise on publication, but what is most notable about it is that in an era when the health of the travel literature genre is decidedly parlous, here is a book that feels decidedly like a publishing throwback.
A well-educated (and presumably well-funded) young man sets out on a series of fairly aimless and indulgent travels, and subsequently invents a theme for them and writes a very effective but less than dazzling book on the subject: this is how travel writing worked for decades, right up until the 1990s. But these days proposals and manuscripts of this kind usually go straight into the slush pile. Somewhere between the Bill Brysons and the interminable years in Provence, Tuscany and Spain commissioning editors decided that there was no longer a market for this kind of thing. It's remarkable that Metcalfe got his book published at all.

His written style is perfectly proficient, and his descriptions of place and atmosphere are very effective - though there is rarely much in the way of true sparkle of flair. His "project" - to visit and tell the tales of "the lost peoples of Central Asia" - however, is at best an exercise in barrel scraping, and at worst outright disingenuous.

Much is made of the author's alleged ability to speak Persian - curious, given that in most of the places he visits Russian or even English would be of rather more use today. The scholarship that is woven between the travelogue sections never sits entirely comfortably, never feels as though the author really owns it, and at times is suffused with the faint perfume of Wikipedia.
And few of the places that he visits really earn him the badge of "intrepid". There's a well-worn backpacker and tour bus trail through the former Soviet "stans" these days; at the time he visited Afghanistan the Lonely Planet crowd were beginning to make forays to Kabul and Bamiyan, and the Kalash Valleys in northwest Pakistan have been a popular "adventure travel" destination for deacades, and still see a few organised tours even now (incidentally, for an excellent book on this latter place, free from any indulgent literary pretensions, see Jonny Bealby's For a Pagan Song: In the Footsteps of the Man Who Would be King - Travels in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan).

As for his insights on the "lost peoples" he encounters, they rarely cast much real light. The section on the Aral Sea region is one of the best in the book - but as an excellent invocation of place, rather than a probing portrait of the Karakalpak people. The strong and affecting chapter on the Jews of Bukhara is most successful in this respect, and in plumping for the Yaghnobis in Tajikistan he was at least original (although he didn't come up with anything very useful to say about them).

But what he manages to tell the reader about the Kalasha could have been gleaned from any tourist guidebook, and when he gets to Afghanistan, and hooks up with an obnoxious former classmate pretending to be a journalist things turn a little ugly, and Metcalfe suddenly seems very naïve and immature, and not yet grown into the boots of a real travel writer. Ex-public schoolboys engaged on an entirely frivolous exercise in self-indulgence in an exotic local - this is exactly the kind of banal excess that came close to annihilating the travel literature genre in the 80s and 90s.

This review is not intended to be the hatchet job of Out of Steppe that it might read as (the book is perfectly enjoyable, short enough to be gobbled up over a weekend, and very proficiently written); it is rather an attempt to skewer some of the more ludicrous effusions that have been heaped upon it. A generation ago travel books of this kind were ten a penny, and if the genre ever recovers from comedy quests and farmhouse renovations in the hills of Italy, then a more mature Metcalfe should be able to carve out a respectable career for himself in its middle ranks.
But the gushing reviews and extravagant claims made for Out of Steppe on its publication seem more likely to represent priceless connections and strong marketing than the reality.

There is one "lost people" of Central Asia that gets no mention in this book: the intrepid, literary and scholarly travel writer. If the Byrons, Thubrons and Elliots were dashing Turkic horsemen, galloping across the steppe from campground to campground, then Daniel Metcalfe, unfortunately, is little more than their declined and impoverished descendent, installed in a grim Soviet tower block on the outskirts of a grey Uzbek city, dreaming of the good old days...