Turkish Panorana

This is an interesting, and very thorough book, although it only sits in the 3-3.5 star range for me.
It took me a while to figure out why is didn't rate higher, and my view is that it covers a very even balance of material - too even, in that it feels like no aspect is in depth enough, and all just scratch the surface. True, it is a book of under 200 pages, and depth is hard to achieve in a short book.

To explain further, the author covers off a lot in this book - he blends his travel in his Bedford van, and the inevitable mechanical issues, tyres etc; the people he meets and interacts with; the main historic points of his visit, including a measure of history where applicable; a little on his food and living conditions with his van; and some great geographical and descriptions of the varied scenery of his journey. He describes all of this well, but not in depth. Generally in a travel book like this there will be a primary interest - one of these elements, sometimes two. These take the main focus, and the other secondary elements make up the context and complete the picture.

So perhaps it was a little passion that was missing in the writing - I found it easy to set this book aside, and I had to work to pick it back up. I confess to stopping this part way to read an 800+ page novel, before picking it up to continue.

The only other negative, and it is a bit of a pet hate of mine, is where an author describes in the narrative the excellent photography opportunities, going to the detail of describing the pose of the person and what they wear, or the scene in detail - only for the book (this edition, at least) to contain none of these photos! As this is the ‘Travel Book Club' edition, the blame for the omission of the photographs is not the authors, as TBC books only rarely contain the photographs of the original publication.

But to more positives, and in summary, Johnson makes a very significant figure-eight journey in Turkey, and covers all of essential locations on his travels. He is a conscientious and thoughtful traveller, who has an obvious interest in people, and this comes across in the writing. Published in 1968, it still did a good job of describing many of the scenes and situations in Turkey when I travelled there in 1994 and again in the early 2000s.

3 stars.