There are readers who devour books with the enthusiasm of a housefire consuming kindling, and then there are those of us who treat a substantial volume less like literature and more like a geographical feature to be slowly, painstakingly mapped. Adrian Chiles, broadcaster and writer, belongs firmly to the latter category. His latest confession is one that will resonate with every bibliophile who has ever abandoned a doorstopper mid-chapter, only to return to it years later with renewed determination and a slightly different pair of reading glasses. After a protracted on-again, off-again engagement spanning more than ten years, Chiles has finally completed Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia — a book first published in 1941 that clocks in at roughly half a million words.
The achievement is, by any measure, remarkable. Not because the book demands genius to comprehend, but because it demands something far rarer in an age of infinite distraction: sustained, patient attention.
The Weight of a Promise Unkept
Chiles opens with disarming honesty about his literary habits during his student years. Rather than gravitating toward the towering figures of the canon, he chose his authors based on the brevity of their collected works. Thomas Hardy made a brief appearance, but largely because he had already sampled a couple of novels at A-level. The rest of his reading list favoured the slim volumes of Arthur Hugh Clough and Christina Rossetti. Quality, he admits, took a back seat to the satisfying heft — or rather, the pleasing lightness — of a book one could carry without strain.
The guilt, as Chiles describes it, has weighed heavily ever since. His penance has been a systematic campaign against literary bulk, tackling the heaviest tomes he could find. Tolstoy’s War and Peace fell within this scope, and Chiles found himself rather enjoying the sprawling narrative. But he is quick to note that in a novel exceeding 550,000 words, finding nothing to enjoy would have been a failure on multiple fronts — his own, Tolstoy’s, and indeed the pair of them collectively. There is a wry self-awareness here that makes the piece immediately likeable.
A Doorstopper Like No Other
This summer marked the culmination of a literary marathon that began, on and off, more than a decade ago. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, at a word count just shy of Tolstoy’s magnum opus, is no casual weekend read. Chiles offers a delightful physical comparison: his hardback edition of War and Peace weighs in at 1,132 grams, while his paperback copy of West’s Yugoslav travelogue tips the scales at a surprising 1,271 grams. Never mind the word count, he urges — feel the weight. The book is, quite literally, heavier than one of the longest novels ever written.
He draws a vivid parallel between reading such a volume and running a marathon. The gruelling middle sections blur into insignificance the moment you reach the final page. It is rather like listening to a long piece of experimental music, where the rare moments of clarity and beauty sound all the more intoxicating precisely because they are surrounded by stretches of what can only be described as glorious, bewildering noise. The reward, Chiles suggests, is not diminished by the struggle — it is amplified by it.
The Sweet Spots That Made It Worthwhile
West’s journey through Yugoslavia, written on the eve of the Second World War and the dissolution that would soon engulf the region, is peppered with observations so sharp and human that they transcend the mere act of travel writing. Chiles highlights three moments that he considers the book’s finest offerings, and each one deserves to be savoured.
There is the observation about cultural philosophy: “These people hold that the way to make life better is to add good things to it, whereas in the west we hold that the way to make life better is to take bad things away from it.” It is a line that could easily serve as a thesis statement for an entire civilisation, and West delivers it with the casual precision of someone who has spent enough time among a culture to understand its deepest assumptions.
Then there is the portrait of a Montenegrin chief of police, described as having “a face so tough and imperturbable that one could have played darts on it.” It is the kind of detail that elevates reportage into art — a single, vivid image that stays with the reader long after the page has been turned.
But the finest moment, according to Chiles, is West’s wry meta-commentary on her own undertaking: “And what has happened there? The answer is too long, as long indeed, as this book, which hardly anybody will read by reason of its length.” Chiles pauses here, and rightly so. He did read it. Every last page. And he insists it was no great hardship — far from it. There is something deeply satisfying about a writer acknowledging that a prediction of obscurity was spectacularly wrong, and doing so with grace.
Why It Matters
In an era dominated by bite-sized content, algorithmic feeds, and the relentless churn of digital information, the act of finishing a half-million-word book is quietly radical. Adrian Chiles’ decade-long journey through Rebecca West’s Yugoslav travelogue is not merely a personal anecdote about perseverance; it is a reminder that some of the most profound insights into human culture, politics, and identity demand time, patience, and a willingness to sit with complexity. West wrote about a region on the brink of catastrophic change, and her observations about the philosophical differences between eastern and western approaches to progress feel startlingly contemporary. That a book published in 1941 can still provoke such reflection — and that a modern reader can find genuine joy in its enormity — speaks to the enduring power of serious, ambitious writing. The message is simple but vital: do not underestimate the value of finishing what you started, even when it takes ten years. The sweet spots, as West herself might have predicted, are worth every difficult page.
