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First published in 1941, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is not quite War and Peace. But it comes close
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Opinion — Adrian Chiles
Back when I was a dilatory student of English literature, I chose my authors for the shortness of their canon. OK, Thomas Hardy was in there, but I’d already read a couple of his for my A-level. Otherwise, I found the intellectual allure of brevity irresistible. No Dickens for me. Arthur Hugh Clough and Christina Rossetti were more my thing. Never mind the quality, feel the slimness of their volumes.
The guilt weighs heavy. My penance since then has been to read some of the weightiest tomes ever written, sheer length offering effective cover for a literary dilettante. In this endeavour I tackled War and Peace and found much to enjoy. But in a novel north of 550,000 words, to have found nothing to enjoy would have been to my discredit, or Tolstoy’s, or the pair of us.
This summer, after an on-off battle of 10 years or more, I finally finished Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia by Rebecca West, first published in 1941. The word count here is given as a little less than Tolstoy’s tome, at roughly half a million. Although my hardback copy of War and Peace weighs 1,132g, while my paperback edition of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon comes in at 1,271g. Never mind the word count, feel the weight.
Reading a doorstopper is like running a marathon – the hard labour is all but forgotten the moment you cross the finish line. It’s also like listening to a long piece of experimental music, in that the rare bits that make sense sound so much sweeter for being surrounded by random din.
West’s sweet spots in the 1,271g of her Yugoslavian travelogue are certainly worth the effort. To pick but three, how about: “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.” Or her description of a Montenegrin chief of police as having “a face so tough and imperturbable that one could have played darts on it”.
Best of all, though, is this: “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.” Well Rebecca, I did – I read it all. And it was no great hardship, far from it.
• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
The guilt weighs heavy. My penance since then has been to read some of the weightiest tomes ever written, sheer length offering effective cover for a literary dilettante. In this endeavour I tackled War and Peace and found much to enjoy. But in a novel north of 550,000 words, to have found nothing to enjoy would have been to my discredit, or Tolstoy’s, or the pair of us.
This report is published with credit to The Guardian. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on The Guardian →
Source: The Guardian · Adrian Chiles. Published 3 Sept 2026, 10:00 am.
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