Books: In the Land of Far Beyond

JOURNEY TO KARS by Philip Glazebrook; 246 pages; Atheneum; $12.95

Before beginning a slow lap around Turkey, before numberless encounters with melons, rugs, mustaches and ruins, Philip Glazebrook asks his big question: "What was the impulse which drove middle-class Victorians to leave the country they loved so chauvinistically, and the company of the race they considered God's last word in breeding, to travel in discomfort, danger, illness, filth and misery among Asiatics whose morals and habits they despised?"

His answer, skillfully shuttled through the narrative of his own journey, is that the adventurers of yore were misfits. The squaring of these pegs, he suggests, began in school with tales of bold Westerners challenging sinister enchanters in the East. The heroes of antiquity, the knights-errant and the pathfinders of empire, symbolized virtues that quickened young hearts. But mercantile Britain offered few opportunities for a romantic. "Where was the use of valor and a knowledge of Xenophon and all the rest of the accoutrements?" Glazebrook inquires. "He had put on knight's armor to play croquet in."

The author, a novelist when closer to home (The Eye of the Beholder, Byzantine Honeymoon), suits up in deflective irony for a different game: to produce a travel book with the confident style of the 19th century and the elegiac soul of a modern spiritual nomad. Glazebrook's reflections on the past are a form of detachment as real as the thousands of miles between him and his family in Dorset. Writing about other travel writers distances him from his own encounters on the trail. By ranking subjectivity above literal facts, he finally removes himself to that lonely height where the artist, not the soldier-adventurer, is hero. "Writing the book," he thinks before catching the train home. "That was the real journey."

Wisely, Glazebrook keeps this sort of modernist baggage to a minimum. He knows what readers want from a travel book, and he does not disappoint them. His route, from the Aegean coast to the borders of Iran and the Soviet Union, stretches like an ancient weft on which history and legend are tightly knotted. This has a sumptuous effect on his prose: "We were surging through bright water off the promontory of Knidos, to which Praxiteles' Venus once drew all travelers . .. Here were the ramparts of Asia crumbling into a sapphire sea."

Through dusty villages and neglected cities called Urgüp and Erzurum, Glaze-brook finally arrives at Kars in the "Land of Far Beyond." Near by, Noah's ark went aground on Mount Ararat, and the Eden of Islamic myth bloomed. Persian, Turk and Russian battled over Kars for centuries. More prosaically, we learn that, except for Norway, Turkey is the only NATO country to border the U.S.S.R.