One popular review of this book says that it puts Patrick Leigh Fermour’s work into a cocked hat. When I read this I thought that this could not possibly be true, but now having read The Enchanted Way I can see where the reviewer was coming from. I would say that in terms of enchantment meter readings and romanticism it is on a par with either ‘A Time of Gift’s or ‘Between the Woods and the Water.’ Blacker has created a modern day companion to these books and in addition provides a contrast to them. Whilst in Romania PLF spent much of his time with the gentry and aristocracy, Blacker spent all of his time with peasants or gypsies; he has given a real account of what it was like to live in Romania amongst them.
Others have criticised Blacker for not painting a balanced picture of life in Romania, in particular the restrictions, restraint and resultant deprivations imposed upon the populace by the Ceaucescu dictatorship and what it was like to live under them. However, he spent a lot of his time in one of the more remote areas of the country which seems to have largely been left to its own devices during the communist years and indeed by Blacker’s account seems to have actually benefited from it. Moreover, he is writing of his experience of Romania which began immediately after the execution of the Ceaucescus and the people that he spent most of his time with, and therefore who figure largely in his book, did not experience great adversity. His objective was not to write an expose of peasant life lived in the communist era but simply to tell us what he experienced, the things that he saw, the people he met and spent time with and how he felt about it. I therefore think it is inappropriate to criticise him for a lack of something that it was never his intention to include. How could he when he had not come up against it?
Blacker does not flinch from laying bare the appalling experiences of the gypsies or the Saxons at the hands of the Nazis and in the case of the former, in addition by the Romanians themselves, including corrupt and brutal police officers.
I therefore believe that The Enchanted Way is a balanced memoir of his time in Romania.
It is certainly a book that you can lose yourself within. It is quite easy to develop fantasies of following in his footsteps and experiencing the last grains of sand remaining in the top half of the hourglass of the medieval way of life that he found in Maramures. A way of living that was dictated by the changing seasons rather than the modern commercially driven life that is dictated by advertising. Heart breaking to read of the rapid changes that are taking place in Maramures as the villagers become entrapped by the often false promises of the benefits of modern life. The contrast between the two ways of life could not be more stark and Blacker succinctly shows us how in many, many respects how we have all been sold off down the river; the river in Breb soon becoming clogged with plastic packaging, killing off the fish.
There is so much of interest in this book and it is multi-layered: in no particular order it tells of the traditional peasant life tracing it through one revolution of the seasons, of folklore and witchcraft, weddings and funerals, courting rituals, tragedies and cruel injustices, of idyllically happy times and Blacker’s own love affair with a gypsy girl.
My only negative comment is that one of the photos is of a funeral and in this photo two young mourners are facing away from the ceremony taking place in front of them and instead are looking directly into Blacker’s camera situated directly behind them. This photograph makes me feel a little uncomfortable. Blacker at the time lived in the same village, as one of them, but yet before he left to attend the funeral he must have thought “I’ll take my camera with me to take some photos which might be useful for a future article or a book.” In that moment of taking the photograph Blacker ceased to be one of them and instead became a journalist who would use the photograph later for financial gain. I think it is not surprising that his book was published after Mihai the man who came to regard Blacker as his son, he being childless, had died. You can’t help wandering that if he had published it whilst he was alive he would have felt to some greater or less extent betrayed. This is obviously my personal opinion about a tiny part of the book and should not be used as a reason not to read this book, because you would be missing a gem.
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