Slow Train to Switzerland: One Tour, Two Trips, 150 Years and a World of Change Apart by Diccon Bewes

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Slow Train to Switzerland: One Tour, Two Trips, 150 Years and a World of Change Apart by Diccon Bewes

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Category: Travel
Rating: 4.5/5
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Reviewed by John Lloyd
Summary: A book that revisits a very early package tour diary with the modern-day equivalent, and one that is a charming yet educational delight, especially for fans of this pocket of Europe.
Buy? Yes Borrow? Yes
Pages: 288 Date: November 2013
Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
ISBN: 9781857886092

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After several years in my position in relation to the book industry (on the periphery but left a bit – and round the bend a lot) I am never surprised at what has a market. Every niche has either been filled, or is getting there. So when I found in looking into this book that the author has written several before now, all extolling the virtues of Switzerland, I was not surprised. I was only regretting he hadn't chosen a cheaper country for us to likewise fall in love with. Still, all power to the author's elbow, as regardless of any other journalism he has produced from exploring the country, here he writes about one lengthy trip around the more popular parts with fresh and new-seeing eyes, helped by those who really were seeing it for the first time, a century and a half ago.

Bewes has also, it seems, fallen in love with what was a lost private masterpiece of travel journalism. In 1863 Thomas Cook shepherded a few people to the edge of Switzerland, and left them to it. Jemima Morrell was one of the seven who persevered in the Conducted Tour that hardly was, and her journals – replete with stunning amateur artworks and decoration – were the result, until they vanished, only to be found by chance in the Blitz. Bewes took it upon himself in 2011 to recreate the journey, his mother alongside him. The delights (he said, sarcastically) of Newhaven and the boat trains to Paris have all been modernised, and there is no need at all now for a mule train across the passes such as the pioneers had taken, but the differences and similarities between the two excursions make for a brilliant book.

Bewes does slightly belabour the back-story to the earlier journal; you might come to this book thinking he had reclaimed it for history himself, yet people in the regional museums and the hotels he visits in her footsteps know of the travelogue, which can be found in print, and has been mimicked before now. But the weft of past writing, from the more official guidebooks such as the Tourists would have relied on, and of course the original reportage, with the modern traveller's experience, is the reason for the book, and in that regard it's an outright success. I've been lucky enough to see Lucerne and go up the Rigi on the trains that were there within years of Miss Jemima, and Grindelwald on a delightful summer's day, and I know that both Bewes and Morrell have an eye for accuracy and clarity and yet space enough for personal opinion.

If there are any corners that need straightening in the book it is perhaps in too many mentions of cities elsewhere that aren't on the included map; Bewes is probably too close to his subject country after all. But the professional and ex-pat insight he offers really turns this book into something much chunkier than travel writing compared and contrasted. There is a strong story to tell of the burgeoning country that Switzerland was in the 1860s, and the utmost change the travel industry effected on the land. As he concludes, the world is definitively altered due to tourism, but the bedrock of Switzerland has stayed the same (it's only the poor glaciers that have retreated). This social history of a foreign country is yet another surprise to this book, and one which proves that this time capsule was well worth opening, the contrast well worth making, and this author probably the best to do so.

I must thank the publishers for my review copy.

How To Be Danish: From Lego to Lund. A Short Introduction to the State of Denmark by Patrick Kingsley is from an author with the ability to make another pricey country in Europe very appealing.

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Buy Slow Train to Switzerland: One Tour, Two Trips, 150 Years and a World of Change Apart by Diccon Bewes at Amazon You can read more book reviews or buy Slow Train to Switzerland: One Tour, Two Trips, 150 Years and a World of Change Apart by Diccon Bewes at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
Buy Slow Train to Switzerland: One Tour, Two Trips, 150 Years and a World of Change Apart by Diccon Bewes at Amazon You can read more book reviews or buy Slow Train to Switzerland: One Tour, Two Trips, 150 Years and a World of Change Apart by Diccon Bewes at Amazon.com.

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