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The Hills of Adonis: A Journey in Lebanon
Book by Thubron, Colin
201 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
10 people are currently reading
269 people want to read
About the author
Colin Thubron
45 books432 followersColin Thubron, CBE FRSL is a Man Booker nominated British travel writer and novelist.
In 2008, The Times ranked him 45th on their list of the 50 greatest postwar British writers. He is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Thubron was appointed a CBE in the 2007 New Year Honours. He is a Fellow and, as of 2010, President of the Royal Society of Literature.
In 2008, The Times ranked him 45th on their list of the 50 greatest postwar British writers. He is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Thubron was appointed a CBE in the 2007 New Year Honours. He is a Fellow and, as of 2010, President of the Royal Society of Literature.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 5, 2016
Lebanon is a place of stark beauty, and in 1967 Thubron spent four months there, walking the tracks across the mountains and following the rivers down the valleys. Not only was he there to see the country, but he had the desire to integrate himself with the people. Whilst there he managed to visit almost all the significant cultural and spiritual sites, places that held the secrets of life and death in this ancient land.
Immersing himself in the landscape on his walk, he either stayed with families in the villages he passed through or camped wild out in the hills. Thubron is a careful traveller, taking time to listen to and observe those he meets, never imposing himself nor being confrontational. It was tense when he was there too; he had to have special permission to move in some areas of the country, and towards the end of his journey there came the Six-day War making a complicated region a lot more dangerous.
As with all of his travel books this is a fine piece of writing. His descriptions of the landscape is fantastic too, evoking the remoteness of the ancient ruins. He has a way with people that draws the best out of them, it may be because he was walking and is was not considered a threat, or it might be just because of his manner and attitude. Above all it was a personal quest for him to discover and reflect on his own personal faith and meaning of life as his draws inspiration from an ancient land.
Immersing himself in the landscape on his walk, he either stayed with families in the villages he passed through or camped wild out in the hills. Thubron is a careful traveller, taking time to listen to and observe those he meets, never imposing himself nor being confrontational. It was tense when he was there too; he had to have special permission to move in some areas of the country, and towards the end of his journey there came the Six-day War making a complicated region a lot more dangerous.
As with all of his travel books this is a fine piece of writing. His descriptions of the landscape is fantastic too, evoking the remoteness of the ancient ruins. He has a way with people that draws the best out of them, it may be because he was walking and is was not considered a threat, or it might be just because of his manner and attitude. Above all it was a personal quest for him to discover and reflect on his own personal faith and meaning of life as his draws inspiration from an ancient land.
February 24, 2024
Having read five others of Thubron's non-fiction works, it had seemed he'd hit his stride in the '80s with "Among the Russians" being his earliest page-turner; whereas, in the '60s, Damascus and Cyprus (while still really interesting) were too descriptive to be engaging.
Then, surprise surprise, "The Hills of Adonis" went and turned that theory on its head. Chronologically coming between the last two I mentioned, it seems like this piece was crafted with the experience of his later years. I figuratively tore through it with enjoyment.
Then, surprise surprise, "The Hills of Adonis" went and turned that theory on its head. Chronologically coming between the last two I mentioned, it seems like this piece was crafted with the experience of his later years. I figuratively tore through it with enjoyment.
August 27, 2021
A superb travel book that captures a moment in history. A superbly written work full of historical and mythological anecdotes . A joy to read , well written with beautiful rich text.
I really enjoyed this excellent work.
I really enjoyed this excellent work.
February 16, 2019
The peculiar appeal of Colin Thubron is that from the beginning he opens a magic door the invitation to which is impossible to resist. Here's the very first paragraph to this book, perhaps the most beguiling of all, written in 1967 when he was twenty-seven and republished in this edition forty years later ... "Of all the gods conceived by ancient men, the last to pass away were those divinities of sun and earth. Because they represented most clearly the needs and instincts of mankind, they remained behind long after their images had been broken. Such a deity was the love goddess, born between the two rivers, who came to Lebanon and wedded with a corn spirit. The Semites called her Astarte, and worshipped her, along with her lover Adonis, as the prime movers of life, whose veins and sinews were the fields and vines of men. But to the Greeks Adonis was a mortal, killed by a wild boar in a valley in Lebanon. Astarte, they said, had bargained for his soul against the powers of the underworld, and such was the force of love that he was sent back to her on earth for that part of the year when the streams are full and the earth green. In time this goddess lost touch with her origins and the cosmic energy drained from the myths. But in this beautiful and diversified land, with its mosaic of truculent and conservative races, her memory was retained in numberless sites and legends, and still abound along the traveller's way as a haunting leitmotiv which returns again and again. So to travel in this land is not only to discover those hardy divinities in their in their many permutations, but to encounter the ancient dream of resurrection which they embodied."
For such a young man the combination of erudition, scholarship and a sumptuous prose style promoted by physical fearlessness is not only remarkable but almost unique. In a new introductory preface he adds, with the good sense or good taste or merely lack of interest never so much as to mention politics or those who manipulate that dirty business except to mourn the irretrievable damage they cause, that his intention was "to recapture the beauty of a ravaged country and those people who used to live there in peace." Thubron, a true poet of history, has the rare ability to be able to live in the present, as we all have to, while remaining immersed not in the more recent past but in an unknown past, with intuited awareness decipherable only through myths and legends lost in time which however much 'rationalists' wish to denigrate continue, increasingly dimly, to provide the sole guide to knowledge.
Lebanon was the home of the long-disappeared Phoenicians, who from the harbour of Tyre sailed the Mediterranean to Greece and Egypt and passed beyond the pillars of Hercules to the Iberian and Celtic coasts in search of metals, putting it about to evade competition that these boundaries marked the end of the world so that for centuries after no other mariners dared pass them for fear of falling off. Mostly on foot and through the passing seasons the author traversed the full length of this small but wild and mountainous country, finding in its hidden valleys living memories and monuments of shrines dedicated to almost every known deity of the ancient world as descendants of Astarte and Adonis - Osiris, Aphrodite, Apollo, Venus, Mithra and even possibly the gods of India who originated in Persia, ending up, rather dolefully and to other religions disgustingly, as the essentially sado-masochistic idols of Christianity, a tortured naked male figure nailed to a cross and a sentimentally tearful but 'pure' simpering woman wreathed in fluttering sky-blue drapery. Islam, like Plato, got it right in one way: figurative art is a seductive lie often barely distinguishable from pornography. But Christianity and Islam lay only skin deep. The Byzantine chapels and the mosques, many still then in use, ignored orthodoxy and practiced their own obscure and still half-pagan salvatory rituals; even the Crusaders forget the reason they were there and left their genealogical mark in the form of Northern blue eyes and blond hair intermingling strangely with Semitic darkness. Many mountain villages knew nothing of the next only a few miles away. That was all soon to end. "Father Gregoire's Mass was the most simple. He felt that the surroundings were wrong. The room was plain and small, lined with portraits of bishops and archimandrites bearded like gods, and a photograph of the President of Lebanon. The service proceeded in a nasal Arabic. Shorn of its doorways and pillared distances, the great rite palled, like a pageant in plain clothes. The priests mumbled cabbalisticly and the congregation was silent. 'Our people do not always worship well', said the father. 'They are rather like Italians, always asking god to give them something. It is profane.' .... I had noticed this too. Young Arabs, practical and quick with solutions, are beginning to say that God is a fraud. 'But what of our brains?', cried the father. 'We may buy or sell with them, but we cannot use them to judge the universe. Science may apply to one sphere, but it could not penetrate all, for it was a product of men's minds, bound for ever to the human delusion.....' So we walked across the river of faith; hands which touch but do not hold."
In a small village in the Northern hinterland, the Arab-Israeli War broke out again, the villagers were frightened and suspicious and Thubron hastily went by car to Tripoli, where foreigners were being evacuated. Scorning all that because he hadn't yet reached his ultimate goal, he made his own way down the coast to what was once Bylbos, where Osiris was said to have been buried. "I slid into the sea at night and swam. Near the harbour the Crusader world was heavy and soft behind: the church and the blunt castle, religion and war. The moon was shining. The waves flowed in my fingers like liquid gold, and drunken fish went spangled over rocks. To the north I saw the darkness where the river of Adonis meets the sea." It was a two-day walk to its source at Aphaca, the destination of countless pilgrims of every faith for countless generations where in the Spring the valley was green and covered with blood-red anemones, the stream bursting from a cavern and splashing its sacrament against the rocks. "The way ends. The Scarlet River flows from galleries of darkness, turned one upon the other, and the pilgrim can follow the goddess no further. She withdraws behind the senselessness of the dark. But the ancients saw this as a sign: life out of stone. Nothing ends but sinks underground, awaiting its time ..... Because time is corruptible, the past may come again, and the figures of love return. And although the pilgrims leave the cavern by the way they entered, they see Adonis rising with the Spring breeze of flutes and cymbals, and feel the frailness of their feet on the shell of the earth."
A book to be lingered over for its sheer loveliness, tender innocence untouched by treacherous idealism. Colin Thubron by now is approaching his eightieth year, his days of solitary adventuring are over, as reading between the lines he makes clear in his last book, 'To a Mountain in Tibet', knitting together all the strands in a way that could almost be called 'mystical'. There's nothing tragic about that for man naturally reserved and modest except in so far as that we all have to promote ourselves to some extent or other to go on living to the full. What is more tragic - though perhaps I'm speaking for myself, he may be more happily detached by inherent temperament, time, and having known at first hand the ruins and repercussions of so many lost Empires - is to have to see a world that not so long ago was still beautiful being eradicated and despoiled by humanity that mostly cares about nothing. The River of Adonis still flows, though now through a majestic landscape littered with the rubbish of or for unseeing tourists who are there not from piety or wonderment but because others of their kind are, and Thubron's Lebanon no longer exists.
For such a young man the combination of erudition, scholarship and a sumptuous prose style promoted by physical fearlessness is not only remarkable but almost unique. In a new introductory preface he adds, with the good sense or good taste or merely lack of interest never so much as to mention politics or those who manipulate that dirty business except to mourn the irretrievable damage they cause, that his intention was "to recapture the beauty of a ravaged country and those people who used to live there in peace." Thubron, a true poet of history, has the rare ability to be able to live in the present, as we all have to, while remaining immersed not in the more recent past but in an unknown past, with intuited awareness decipherable only through myths and legends lost in time which however much 'rationalists' wish to denigrate continue, increasingly dimly, to provide the sole guide to knowledge.
Lebanon was the home of the long-disappeared Phoenicians, who from the harbour of Tyre sailed the Mediterranean to Greece and Egypt and passed beyond the pillars of Hercules to the Iberian and Celtic coasts in search of metals, putting it about to evade competition that these boundaries marked the end of the world so that for centuries after no other mariners dared pass them for fear of falling off. Mostly on foot and through the passing seasons the author traversed the full length of this small but wild and mountainous country, finding in its hidden valleys living memories and monuments of shrines dedicated to almost every known deity of the ancient world as descendants of Astarte and Adonis - Osiris, Aphrodite, Apollo, Venus, Mithra and even possibly the gods of India who originated in Persia, ending up, rather dolefully and to other religions disgustingly, as the essentially sado-masochistic idols of Christianity, a tortured naked male figure nailed to a cross and a sentimentally tearful but 'pure' simpering woman wreathed in fluttering sky-blue drapery. Islam, like Plato, got it right in one way: figurative art is a seductive lie often barely distinguishable from pornography. But Christianity and Islam lay only skin deep. The Byzantine chapels and the mosques, many still then in use, ignored orthodoxy and practiced their own obscure and still half-pagan salvatory rituals; even the Crusaders forget the reason they were there and left their genealogical mark in the form of Northern blue eyes and blond hair intermingling strangely with Semitic darkness. Many mountain villages knew nothing of the next only a few miles away. That was all soon to end. "Father Gregoire's Mass was the most simple. He felt that the surroundings were wrong. The room was plain and small, lined with portraits of bishops and archimandrites bearded like gods, and a photograph of the President of Lebanon. The service proceeded in a nasal Arabic. Shorn of its doorways and pillared distances, the great rite palled, like a pageant in plain clothes. The priests mumbled cabbalisticly and the congregation was silent. 'Our people do not always worship well', said the father. 'They are rather like Italians, always asking god to give them something. It is profane.' .... I had noticed this too. Young Arabs, practical and quick with solutions, are beginning to say that God is a fraud. 'But what of our brains?', cried the father. 'We may buy or sell with them, but we cannot use them to judge the universe. Science may apply to one sphere, but it could not penetrate all, for it was a product of men's minds, bound for ever to the human delusion.....' So we walked across the river of faith; hands which touch but do not hold."
In a small village in the Northern hinterland, the Arab-Israeli War broke out again, the villagers were frightened and suspicious and Thubron hastily went by car to Tripoli, where foreigners were being evacuated. Scorning all that because he hadn't yet reached his ultimate goal, he made his own way down the coast to what was once Bylbos, where Osiris was said to have been buried. "I slid into the sea at night and swam. Near the harbour the Crusader world was heavy and soft behind: the church and the blunt castle, religion and war. The moon was shining. The waves flowed in my fingers like liquid gold, and drunken fish went spangled over rocks. To the north I saw the darkness where the river of Adonis meets the sea." It was a two-day walk to its source at Aphaca, the destination of countless pilgrims of every faith for countless generations where in the Spring the valley was green and covered with blood-red anemones, the stream bursting from a cavern and splashing its sacrament against the rocks. "The way ends. The Scarlet River flows from galleries of darkness, turned one upon the other, and the pilgrim can follow the goddess no further. She withdraws behind the senselessness of the dark. But the ancients saw this as a sign: life out of stone. Nothing ends but sinks underground, awaiting its time ..... Because time is corruptible, the past may come again, and the figures of love return. And although the pilgrims leave the cavern by the way they entered, they see Adonis rising with the Spring breeze of flutes and cymbals, and feel the frailness of their feet on the shell of the earth."
A book to be lingered over for its sheer loveliness, tender innocence untouched by treacherous idealism. Colin Thubron by now is approaching his eightieth year, his days of solitary adventuring are over, as reading between the lines he makes clear in his last book, 'To a Mountain in Tibet', knitting together all the strands in a way that could almost be called 'mystical'. There's nothing tragic about that for man naturally reserved and modest except in so far as that we all have to promote ourselves to some extent or other to go on living to the full. What is more tragic - though perhaps I'm speaking for myself, he may be more happily detached by inherent temperament, time, and having known at first hand the ruins and repercussions of so many lost Empires - is to have to see a world that not so long ago was still beautiful being eradicated and despoiled by humanity that mostly cares about nothing. The River of Adonis still flows, though now through a majestic landscape littered with the rubbish of or for unseeing tourists who are there not from piety or wonderment but because others of their kind are, and Thubron's Lebanon no longer exists.
July 31, 2019
I found this quite a mixture. Beautiful at times, exhaustingly erudite at others. Lebanon was my home as a teenager and I loved the country very much. I was there when Thubron was. But while he evoked the Lebanon I knew then vividly, he crammed so much about the ancient history and mythology into parts of the text, I just glazed over.
February 14, 2025
I’ve rather enjoyed Thubron’s more recent books, but in this early career work, he feels far more tedious. There are some genuinely engaging observations and interactions here, but much of the rest of the book keeps dissolving into historical descriptions made all the more demanding thanks to an overly lyrical style of writing.
June 3, 2021
In anticipation of Thubron's newest book (to be published in November 2021) I'm working my way through his back catalog of travel books. This one, published in 1968, was his second such book.
I think this is a much better work than the first one, "Mirror to Damascus." While that was mostly a history book (with some short personal experiences interspersed throughout) there is much more of a story here. It describes several months that Thubron spent walking across Lebanon, which were punctuated by the six day's war.
That said, this is still mostly a history book. If "Mirror to Damascus" was a 20/80 split between travelogue and history, this one is 30/70. But the encounters with local residents and ambitious officials are amusing, and Thubron's on-the-ground observations from while the war was going on are valuable. The history is told in an erudite way and there are some wonderful little rabbit holes here. The story of Lady Hester Stanhope's little kingdom near the village of Sidon stands out. I've added a biography of her to my "must-read" pile.
Thubron doesn't make quite as many assumptions about our background knowledge this time. That makes the book a bit easier to read than his first. But, once again, be prepared to read this one with wikipedia at hand. Suggested articles include: Phoenicia, the Maronite Church, the Crusades (which? I don't know).
Stay tuned for some comments about Thubron's hard-to-find third book, "Jerusalem."
I think this is a much better work than the first one, "Mirror to Damascus." While that was mostly a history book (with some short personal experiences interspersed throughout) there is much more of a story here. It describes several months that Thubron spent walking across Lebanon, which were punctuated by the six day's war.
That said, this is still mostly a history book. If "Mirror to Damascus" was a 20/80 split between travelogue and history, this one is 30/70. But the encounters with local residents and ambitious officials are amusing, and Thubron's on-the-ground observations from while the war was going on are valuable. The history is told in an erudite way and there are some wonderful little rabbit holes here. The story of Lady Hester Stanhope's little kingdom near the village of Sidon stands out. I've added a biography of her to my "must-read" pile.
Thubron doesn't make quite as many assumptions about our background knowledge this time. That makes the book a bit easier to read than his first. But, once again, be prepared to read this one with wikipedia at hand. Suggested articles include: Phoenicia, the Maronite Church, the Crusades (which? I don't know).
Stay tuned for some comments about Thubron's hard-to-find third book, "Jerusalem."
July 10, 2025
I am an enthusiastic travelogue reader; Colin Thubron is one of my favorite travel writers.
I found this book on archive.org and had to read it from a screen (not my preference). In the past I've put the audio on and cringed at the worst robotic voice imaginable. To my delight, I changed the settings to "Ryan" (UK English). There are still stutters and oddities, but AI is definitely improving audio.
Back to Lebanon. Thubron wrote this after a four-month sojourn on foot in 1967, when he was 28. The descriptive writing is superb. I came across a dozen words whose meanings I didn't know — words I had never heard of before. 28!
I didn't know about Maronite Christians who, at one time, were a majority in Lebanon. There is such a mix of cultures in a relatively small geographical area. My favorite parts were when Thubron walked into a village or up a mountain and stayed with a family.
I put this book on my "niche" shelf, because I wouldn't recommend it to a general reader.
I found this book on archive.org and had to read it from a screen (not my preference). In the past I've put the audio on and cringed at the worst robotic voice imaginable. To my delight, I changed the settings to "Ryan" (UK English). There are still stutters and oddities, but AI is definitely improving audio.
Back to Lebanon. Thubron wrote this after a four-month sojourn on foot in 1967, when he was 28. The descriptive writing is superb. I came across a dozen words whose meanings I didn't know — words I had never heard of before. 28!
I didn't know about Maronite Christians who, at one time, were a majority in Lebanon. There is such a mix of cultures in a relatively small geographical area. My favorite parts were when Thubron walked into a village or up a mountain and stayed with a family.
I put this book on my "niche" shelf, because I wouldn't recommend it to a general reader.
April 28, 2023
This book, like Colin Thubron's books on Cyprus and Damascus, takes place in the late 1960s and were his first travel books. All these places since then have been impacted by conflicts. This book is most similar to his book on Cyprus where he walked through out the country and then intersperses the ancient and religious history of each place. I found myself skimming through some of the historical discussions, but did enjoy his discussions on his travels. While he was in Lebanon, the Seven Day War took place. While there were tensions between the various groups that he stayed with, it is nothing like it is now. This book gives a good feel for rural Lebanon at that time and the interactions between the different religious groups in the country.
April 1, 2020
Thubron in was in Lebanon in 1967, the same year as I. He writes of places where I have been. Such memories!! In addition to being a travelogue, Thubron is on a quest for the roots of human life located in the depths of nature, symbolized by Astarte/Aphrodite/Venus and Tammuz/Adonis/Osirus. His is an interesting critique of rational, emotionless religion. I enjoyed the book.
August 29, 2021
At times wonderful, but then he dives down rabbit holes of 12th century kings and 13th century army movement. Thubron is at his best when he actually writes travel books
April 5, 2017
An enjoyable account of walking though the hills of Lebanon.
May 21, 2016
This was my introduction to Thubron. It is a masterpiece. This is an excellent read. It captures the essence of pre-war Lebanon and contains many insights valid to today.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews