Caravans

by James A. Michener

In this romantic adventure of wild Afghanistan, master storyteller James Michener mixes the allure of the past with the dangers of today. After an impetuous American girl, Ellen Jasper, marries a young Afghan engineer, her parents hear no word from her. Although she wants freedom to do as she wishes, not even she is sure what that means. In the meantime, she is as good as lost in that wild land, perhaps forever....

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Historical, Adventure, Middle East, Novels, Book Club

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

James Albert Michener is best known for his sweeping multi-generation historical fiction sagas, usually focusing on and titled after a particular geographical region. His first novel, Tales of the South Pacific , which inspired the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Toward the end of his life, he created the Journey Prize, awarded annually for the year's best short story published by an emerging Canadian writer; founded an MFA program now, named the Michener Center for Writers, at the University of Texas at Austin; and made substantial contributions to the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, best known for its permanent collection of Pennsylvania Impressionist paintings and a room containing Michener's own typewriter, books, and various memorabilia.

Michener's entry in Who's Who in America says he was born on Feb. 3, 1907. But he said in his 1992 memoirs that the circumstances of his birth remained cloudy and he did not know just when he was born or who his parents were.

Reviews

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty) · Rating 4 out of 5]

James Michener was such an amazing man. Intrepid adventurer, brilliant scholar, prolific author. We shan't see the likes of him again, more's the pity. He traveled extensively in Afghanistan prior to writing this novel. I don't envy him the physical discomfort that must have entailed, but I loved the authenticity it brought to the story.

This book is only about 340 pages---a mere novella by Michener standards. It takes place in 1946. Mark Miller is sent on a diplomatic mission to find Ellen Jaspar, an American woman who married an Afghan man and then disappeared. Miller's travels take him to the remotest reaches of Afghanistan's deserts and mountains. He suffers extremes of heat (130 degrees!!) and cold. He witnesses appalling barbarity but also finds great warmth and hospitality, and just barely begins to comprehend the complexity of the Afghan mind and culture.

Plot and character development are somewhat sacrificed early in the book in the interest of educating the reader. I thought it was a more than fair trade-off for what I got to learn about Afghan culture, history, and terrain. Deeper into the story Michener drops out of teacher mode and lets the story flow without interruption, so I'd say that's the more exciting portion of the book. But it was ALL fascinating to me.

RANDOM FUN STUFF:

1)If you make a camel mad at you, you have to remove all of your clothes and leave them in a pile so the camel can "fight your clothes." The camel will stomp on them, gum them, and toss them around as a substitute for fighting with you, and then she will forgive you and become cooperative again.

2)Should you ever doubt Michener's sense of humor, here's my one big laugh from the book:
"I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick?"

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a great book and gives you a feel for Afghanistan. It was written in the 60s about the 40s. And if you replace Taliban for Mullahs and deemphasize the Russian's it could have been written today. Afghanistan truly is a unique place and the book captures that well. For example, early in the book it talks about how the German's came into Afghanistan and built all of these amazing bridges but after a season or two they were destroyed. But the simple Afghan bridges lasted years and years. A long history has destroyed the land and left nothing but mountains and deserts. I have been to many of the places mentioned in the book and it was great to read about the places I haven't been but flown over (desert near the Iranian border) and the Buddha statues (since destroyed by the Taliban). At the end of the book there is a note to the reader about changes in the 17 years from when the book takes place and when it was written. I will tell you - the Afghanistan of 2011 mirrors 1943 more than the 60s. During the 60s and 70s Afghanistan strove towards the west with electricity, "equality" for women and such...the 1989-2011 has set it back to previous centuries.

[W · Rating 3 out of 5]

Relatively short for a Michener book,this is about 1940s Afghanistan,and was written in the 1960s.Afghanistan wouldn't have been much in the news then,few people in the US would have heard of it.

But Michener liked to write about places off the beaten track.It is another matter,that to me,his books seemed to go on forever,and lacked pace.

Michener had travelled through Afghanistan,and his description of the land and the people is authentic.The story itself is rather dull and meandering.

However,the potential for endless conflict was present even then,and Michener foresaw it in his conclusion.I have certainly seen Afghanistan mired in a series of bloody conflicts,practically all my life.

[John Devlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A surprisingly well plotted and fascinating book!

1946 Afghanistan written in 1960.

The Afghanistan of today is all here:the women wearing the chador, the mullahs running the streets beating the offenders, the catamites…

The shoots of modernism that seem hopeful at the time and even in the 1960 coda coming to naught…the author references Iran’s modernism under the shah…ahh the irony.

All that aside the story is top notch…a 20 something American state dept is tasked with finding the enigmatic American woman who ran off and married an afghani.

Nothing is as it seems between these people and the battle between civilization and primitivism is equally opaque.

[Blaine DeSantis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another marvelous book by Michener. This time we go back in time to one of his earliest works and take a close look at the country of Afghanistan. I had only wished the US State and Defense Departments had read this work before we decided sent troops over there. Michener writes this book in 1963 and sets it in 1946. He does not use his standard plot devices, instead here he begins with an American diplomat stationed in Afghanistan and he is being sent on a mission to find a young girl from Pennsylvania who ran off to Afghanistan with a man to be his 2nd wife and her parents have not heard a word from her in 13 months. This is all Michener needs to roll along with a tour de force trip in which the countryside and culture of Afghanistan takes center stage. Oh, we do meet a lot of interesting characters along the way, and our diplomat eventually find the long lost girl, but we see all the beauty and savagery of this country and we begin to understand some of the problems that will always be a part of this area of the world. If you like Michener and have not read some of his earlier works then this is a great book to read, plus it does not tip the scales at over 1,000 pages as many of his other works.
I do have one major criticism of the book. I bought the ebook on Kindle and there are hundreds of misspelled words and horrid editing mistakes. It is not Michener's fault that these are so prevalent in this edition and therefore I did not reduce the * rating for the book. But beware of these awful flaws in the Kindle edition.
You can see my full review at https://blaineseclecticbookshelf.word...

[Ron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite--perhaps because of--its age, Michner's view of the then-current affairs and potential futures for Afghanistan make fascinating reading now. Forty-five years ago he recognized the potential of fundamentalist Moslem control of the land, but he voted for the secularists. He was wrong, but it didn't have to be that way.

(I never saw the motion picture based on Michner's book and encourage a reader to seek the novel rather than the movie.)

For a modern alternative ending to Afghanistan's latest chapter as political football to world powers and religions, read Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea .

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this book after loving Michener's Hawaii, hoping for a similarly wonderful reading experience. I was disappointed. The best I can say is that I learned some things--the book takes you around Afghanistan in the 1940s, introducing a variety of places and cultures and including pertinent historical information--and that's why it gets 2 stars despite being otherwise awful.

This book suffers from the twin problems of an uninspired, meandering plot and a narrator who is one of the most unlikeable characters I've encountered in quite a while. First, the plot. The book is marketed as a tale about a diplomat (Mark) searching for an American girl (Ellen) who married an Afghan, then disappeared. But the first 100 pages of the 400-page book are all about everyday diplomatic life in Kabul (there isn't even any conflict to keep readers entertained), and we're past the halfway point before Mark bothers to ask Ellen's husband about her whereabouts--despite the fact that everyone has known the husband's location all along and he has nothing to hide! A plot that serves mostly as an excuse to explore a setting can work, but in a novel, descriptions of the geography and culture can't just replace interesting events and dialogue.

For that matter, all of the characters work to avoid plot advancement: before actually sending someone to search for Ellen, or even talk to her husband, the U.S. government interviews all of her former boyfriends and roommates in an attempt to figure out "what was wrong with her" that made her marry an Afghan in the first place, and there's much serious discussion of whether Ellen's hometown was objectively a bad place. (If Michener intended to poke fun at the investigation this might have been clever, but unfortunately he seems 100% serious, providing some unintentional comedy.) If missing-persons investigations are conducted this way in real life, I'm surprised anyone is ever found.

Then there's Mark. He's a jerk. For instance, he theorizes that Ellen chose her unusual lifestyle because she can't have kids, resulting in--wait for it--"a barrenness of spirit." I haven't even gotten to his creepy relationship with the Nazi refugee Stiglitz, a prime example of character relationships that make no sense. Mark is Jewish (and prides himself on having "table manners" despite that fact, as if Judaism and etiquette were mutually exclusive), and he veers back and forth between wanting Stiglitz dead for the atrocities he committed and wanting to be his friend. I can't imagine why, since Stiglitz--like Mark and most of the other characters--is utterly unappealing and unsympathetic. Oh, and it's worth mentioning that Mark has random, plot-irrelevant flings with most of the female characters in the book. Give me a break.

Ultimately, this book was a huge letdown. It read like a travelogue--dull, with little plot or conflict and uninteresting characters. It felt incredibly dated (I suppose I should have known that from the plot summary: it is, after all, a book about a white man traveling around an Eastern country, getting "closer to earth," and attempting to "rescue" an American woman he has no reason to believe is even in danger). Unfortunately, after Caravans, I will be wary of Michener books in the future. For those who want to learn about Afghanistan through enjoyable fiction, I'd recommend Khaled Hosseini's works instead.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first book I read for my 1963 reading list. It was #4 on the bestseller list for that year. At under 500 pages it is short for a Michener book.

The location is Afghanistan. The year is 1946. I would bet that the country was not much in the news in the year after WWII ended though it was a time of anxiety about the USSR and the spread of communism. In the story however, the anxiety at the US Embassy in Kabul is over an American young woman who had married an Afghan man she met in college and returned with him to his country.

When the story opens, Ellen Jasper's parents back in Pennsylvania have not heard from their daughter in some time and have contacted their senator, asking him to put pressure on the Embassy to investigate her whereabouts and well being.

Mark Miller, descendant of Jewish immigrants to the US from Germany in the mid 19th century, is now posted in Kabul as a junior grade State Dept officer. Since he speaks the language the assignment goes to him to find Ellen. Why mention that he is Jewish? It plays into the story in an interesting way.

The novel is a wonderful introduction to this country in the days when "Kabul today shows what Palestine was like at the time of Jesus" as they were wont to say at the Embassy. In fact, the Mullahs rule the society and Miller is a witness to two incidents of stoning; one of a female adulterer and one of a male homosexual. But there are also young men who wish to bring the country into modern times, both as a society and technologically. Ellen's husband is one of those men.

As Miller sets out in pursuit of the missing woman, Michener takes the reader on a journey through the mountains and deserts of that forbidding land. According to his Author's Note, he himself spent time traveling in Afghanistan before writing the book. Plenty of adventure ensues, during which he draws a complete introduction to the lives, issues, and customs of the times. Of course, there is also romance and some pretty racy scenes for a Michener book

I was somewhat amused by Michener's treatment of the Ellen Jasper character. Miller does find her. She is fearless, wild, and in complete disagreement with wars and progress and the American imperialist agenda. She goes through men as if it were the free love era of the 1960s. Michener was no fan of hippies, protesters, or any anti-American sentiments. Indeed he was a complete patriot. So he approaches this character with a combination of psychological interpretation and condescension. However, Mark Miller falls for her and hard.

I could see how the book became a bestseller in 1963!

[Corey Woodcock · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5-This was the most unexpectedly good read I've had in awhile. I don't know what I was expecting, but it far surpassed it.

The basic premise of this is only somewhat intriguing-a snotty American girl has married an Afghan man, run off with him to Afghanistan, and her parents haven't heard from her since. Some schmuck from the embassy is sent to find her-only to become far more cultured than he ever expected, and finding much more. I expected a good adventure, but what I didn't expect was to learn quite a bit along the way.

The characters were very interesting. We have mulluhs, Kochi tribesman, and a Nazi war criminal who, as he said, is "already a dead man". Our protagonist, Mark Miller, more or less an everyman, travels from the snowy foothills of the Hindu Kush, to Kabul, to the scorching sand and shale of the Dasht-e Margo (translated as Desert of Death), and more. There are extremely interesting insights here, and by the end it seemed the *least* interesting part of the story was Ellen, the missing girl from the US.

There are some things in this book that wouldn't hold up to the PC scrutiny of the 2020s, but given that this was written in the 1960s, I think it was incredibly forward thinking for its time. This is about a country at a crossroads. It takes place in the late 1940s, and a heavy theme is the pull of westernization on a country like Afghanistan, who has struggled with identity issues its entire existence. At the time of it's writing, Afghanistan had made some major changes that really had begun around the 40s-you can look up pictures of the country in the 60s and it looks like it could be any given city in America or Europe. Things have gone a different direction than Michener anticipated at the time however.

Overall, it's worth a read, easily. It may have gotten a full 5/5 had it not slowed down a bit around the 3/4 mark when a new plot line is introduced. For that, I had to dock it. Loved it, and can't wait to read more Michener.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a book! Best one I have read in awhile. Extremely thought provoking and enlightening even though it was written quite awhile ago and then about an era even before that. I would have LOVED to have had someone read this book at the same time and we could discuss it. By far the best book I have read that would be awesome for a book club.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

At just 336 pages, Caravans is a tight, talky, and wonderfully insightful piece of work set entirely in Afghanistan. The novel centers on Mark Miller, a young American diplomat stationed in 1946 Kabul, who is charged to find Ellen, a woman who married an American-educated Afghan named Nazrullah and then disappeared. He eventually finds her among a group of nomads. Miller’s traveling companion, meanwhile, is Dr. Otto Stiglitz, a Nazi war criminal.

More than forty years after the publication of Caravans, we live in a world obsessed with competing moral visions (e.g., torture is necessary when we do it, evil when they do it). But these are hardly new, as Michener suggests over and over. His characters struggle with the barbarity of traditional culture even as they are confronted with the overwhelming force and, yes, barbarity of encroaching modernism. Nazrullah, for instance, makes an impassioned speech suggesting that, for all its faults, at least Afghanistan is no Germany (i.e, we stone women and children but at least we don’t gas them):

"I went to Germany at the age of twenty. Before that I’d been educated by private tutors whose main job, it seems to me now, was to impress me with the moral depravity of Afghanistan and the timeless glory of Europe. I knew no better than to accept their indoctrination at face value and reported to Germany fully prepared to exhibit my tutors’ prejudices. But when I reached Göttingen I found that the true barbarians were not the primitives who stone women in Ghazni -- and we have some real primitives in this country -- but the Germans. From 1938 through 1941 I remained as their guest, to witness the dreadful degeneration of a culture which might once have been what my tutors claimed but was now a garish travesty. Believe me, Miller, I learned more in Germany than you’ll ever learn in Afghanistan.

"As you know, I went from Germany to Philadelphia, where half the people thought I was a Negro. What I didn’t learn in Germany, you taught me. Why do you suppose I wear this beard? Before I grew it I made a six-week experiment. I decided to be a Negro . . . lived in Negro hotels, ate in their restaurants, read their papers and dated Negro girls. It was an ugly, ugly life, being a Negro in your country . . . maybe not so bad as being a Jew in Germany, but a lot worse than being an Afghan in Ghazni. To prove to Philadelphians I wasn’t a Negro, I grew this beard and wore a turban, which I had never worn at home."

But what I love about Michener is that he doesn’t settle for the easy argument. Ellen eventually leaves Nazrullah for the Nazi Stiglitz, who converts to Islam. The Jewish Miller is forced to confront the German, while the Afghan assures him that purity -- racial, moral -- exists only in Hitler’s head. “If the facts were known,” Nazrullah tells Miller, “probably half our Afghan heritage is Jewish. For hundreds of years we boasted of being one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. The Hitler decreed us to be Aryans, which gave us certain advantages.”

Later Ellen describes her own disillusionment -- with the easy bigotry of Americans during the war years, with “kept professors” whose “moral responsibility was to dissect the world” but who instead “were paid to defend it.” Her father, she explains, was one of those men.

“'What I mean is, my father described anything out of the ordinary as ridiculous, and I wanted to outrage his whole petty scale of judgment. What was the most ridiculous thing I could do? Run off with an Afghan who had a turban and another wife.' She laughed a little, then added, 'Do you know what started my disillusionment with Nazrullah? That turban. He wore it in Philadelphia for show. He’d never think of wearing it in Kabul.'”

Of course, Ellen does top herself when she trades in her manly turban for a mixed-up Nazi. No easy answers, little room for self-righteousness -- this is what I love about Michener.

[Chrisl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have read, or at least started, most if not all Michener books. Looking back over the decades, Caravans comes to mind most often. Book's focus not fragmented.
Recently read this one again. Surprisingly applicable to our contemporary world. If more prone to using that 5th star, I'd do so after the reread.

[Paul Cornelius · Rating 3 out of 5]

For some reason, I started reading Caravans thinking it was about Iran. It's not. Afghanistan is the setting. And I suppose some reading it think Michener was dead on correct about his speculation, in 1963, on the country's future. He is certainly accurate about the forces at play within the country and its aversion to outsiders of any stripe. But Michener, being the Cold War Democratic liberal that he was, just cannot help but see that modernization is on the horizon in both Afghanistan and Iran and the future for both looks wonderful. Electricity and books, he suggests, will change everything for the better. At least that is what you're left to assume following the endless conversations between the protagonist, Mark Miller, a junior US diplomat assigned to Afghanistan, and a wayward young American woman, Ellen Jaspar, who finally appears in person three-fifths of the way through the book. After listening to her, you wish perhaps that nobody had managed to dig her out of the nomad caravan in which she has situated herself. Had this book been written just a few years later, in the late 1960s, readers and Michener could have positioned her as a hippie on the "Hippie Trail" that stretched from Europe, through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and ending in Bangkok. As is, Ellen appears to be some sort of proto-hippie, determined to save the past, while each of the men she "marries" are determined modernizers. And frankly, Ellen's "thoughts" are enough to almost kill interest in the novel. Which would have been a shame, because otherwise it's a nice work. Michener grabs the essence of central Asia and has clearly researched the vagaries of its history thoroughly. That reason alone, plus seeing it alongside Michener's better efforts, is enough to spend a couple of days reading through it.

[Ebookwormy1 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clocking in at just under 340 pages, Caravans lacks both the heft and span typical of the generational saga for which Michener is known. This is not the best of Michener and it’s not my favorite, but I’m glad I read it after all these years.

What makes this book especially intriguing is its publication in the year 1963, and setting in the post-World War II Afghanistan of the late 1940s. The main character of the work is the land itself: Afghanistan. Beautiful and complex, Michener presents us with a land full of struggle and drops story into it. We become acquainted with Afghanistan’s aspiration to modern stability, feel the heat of the nation's steep in history, and cheer for it’s precocious steps to maturity. The time in which Michener published this work, the 1960s, were relatively stable and optimistic for Afghanistan, and setting the book 20 years prior allowed Michener to dramatize the people and events bringing about this ambitious adolescence.

“We went into the night and for the first time in my life I saw the stars hanging low over the desert, for the atmosphere above us contained no moisture, no dust, no impediment of any kind. It was probably the cleanest air man knows and it displayed the stars as no other could. Not even at Qala Bist, which stood by the river, had the air been so pure. The stars seemed enormous, but what surprised me most was the fact that they dropped right to the horizon, so that to the east some rose out of dunes while to the west other crept beneath piles of shale.” pg. 172 Caravans, Michener, 1963.

Afghans are portrayed as ambitious, clever people shaped by their history and geography, who are accustomed to surviving in conflict with the environment, each other, and external powers – from Alexander the Great, through various conquests from India and the terror of Genghis Khan, to the Russians, English and Americans in the 1940s. It is the emergence of Russian and American power that rocked Afghanistan from the 1970s through the 2010s, but while Michener anticipates it’s coming, he had no knowledge of those events at the time story was written. This gives a glimpse of Afghanistan BEFORE the modern age, BEFORE the encroachment of modern powers, BEFORE penetration of the state to remote areas, BEFORE the height of the Cold War that drew Russia and the USA into contention, BEFORE globalization brought America closer to Asia.

“’I claimed that originally Afghanistan knew the freedom of the caravan, but that willfully the people put themselves in these village prisons under the rule of the mullahs…. Miller claimed that we can never go back to the caravan. That we will know freedom only when the villages have books and roads and electricity.’ ‘Your right about the past… He’s right about the future… Some day all of us will live in villages like this. But they will be better villages.’ And he was gone.” pg. 244-245 Caravans, Michener, 1963.

The most distasteful characters are Westerners, which shields the narrative from contemporary claims of obtrusion. Bound to their countries of origin by birth and culture, seeking adventure, experience, and/ or refuge in an exotified remote locale, the Westerners are promiscuous people focused on personal or political objectives and willing to use Afghanistan and it’s people to further their own ends. Through them, we see the messiness of the struggle: people engaged in using others often discover the others are also playing them – and in this case, the Afghans have the home field advantage.

Added into the mix are various themes illustrating the palate of Afghan topography. Political complexity is illustrated as Afghans, mullahs, urban educated, rural nomads, the Americans, Russians and English compete for advantage. Religious complexity is painted through Jewish, Christian (Catholic, Protestant), and Muslim beliefs/ historical claims and is magnified by the post-Hitler era in which the story takes place. Social complexity emerges between wandering nomads and the toe hold of civilization represented by Afghan governmental employees, between citizens of international education/ language/ experience and under resourced locals, between lawfulness of cities and pragmatism of remote settlements the state literally cannot reach, and between mullahs seeking to enforce a conservative Islam and worshippers engaging in a syncretistic survivalism.

All of this complexity is brushed over with a romanticized stroke that makes the book more fictional travelogue and less social commentary, while taking us back to Michener’s time when the country of Afghanistan, it’s history and people, were not well known outside of Asia. A map in the fore leaf helps us to follow along on the journey, and brief but insightful notes clarify the line between imagination and history in a typical Michener touch.

Now that I have his perspective, I’m ready for other titles. What do you recommend?

If you’d like a brief timeline of Afghanistan’s history in the modern age, see the BBC here:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-a...

For epic Mitchener treatment of countries far flung from his American home, see
Poland, Mitchener, 1983
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

The Source (Israel), Mitchener, 1965
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

The Covenant (South Africa), Mitchener, 1980
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Or epic Mitchener closer to his American home:
Centennial, Mitchener, 1974
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Texas, Mitchener, 1985
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

The Caribbean, Mitchener, 1989
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Ron Wroblewski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Got off to a slow start but once Miller started on his search for Ellen it really picked up, and I was anticipating what would happen next. Learned a lot about Afghanistan and it's peoples in the 1940s.
Would have loved to see if Miller and Mira eventually got together - they were a good pair.

[Jeff Dickison · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent, if fictional, story of Afghanistan in 1946. I served in the Air Force in Turkey in the 60's and it did not appear that much had changed in the middle east from '46 to '66. All of the peoples involved had the ring of truth to them, except for one, Ellen. That kept the book from being a 5-star novel. Even Michener, as the author, could not make her behavior comprehensible. Recommended.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.75 stars

This time Michener creates a story set in the Kingdom of Afghanistan in 1946. This was a lovely read, and a short one relatively to his fat books. A single story here, unlike in his most other books. Michener has done a great job of portrayal of social and economic life in Afghanistan, along with integrating its history, culture, and most essentially the terrain. LoVeLy!!

“Afghanistan, one of the most inconspicuous nations on earth. In 1946 it was just emerging from the bronze age, a land incredibly old, incredibly tied to an ancient past. At the embassy we used to say, “Kabul today shows what Palestine was like at the time of Jesus.”

He also writes about the ill-treatment of women in the country who have been responsible for adultery, which was terrifying yet has been (and still is) the truth. Also a lot is written about the life of caravans and the people involved in it and their perceptions and opinions of life's essences. And much, much more !

The book also expresses ideas and opinions using opposing characters, about the 'unspoiled' and 'civilized' world of Afghanistan Vs the so-called 'civilized world of the West' and how we are destroying ourselves.

Considering it is a smaller book than the author's other counterparts, this is a good book to start off with for those who wish to try James Michener's works.
Certainly recommended !! :)

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel is now 45 years old and in my mind, remains as topical, fascinating and revelatory as when it was first published. Michener spins a great story against the backdrop of tribal politics & Western prejudice that prevail today. It shows Afghanistan to be an amazingly complex culture both protected and exploited by a cruel terrain. It deepened my fascination with its many nations, tribes and incredible beauty. Someday, someday I'll get there...

Like Nevil Shute, Michener can speak through a female character with great credibility and little condescension- not an easy feat for a male writer of this generation. Bravo, James!

[Katy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this one, so much more than I imagined.

[Colin Falconer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved Caravans for its authenticity - Michener travelled the country extensively in the sixties, when it was still possible to do that. The combination of brutality and humour makes it a unique adventure. A great story combined with a breathtaking insight into the culture, history and geography of a forbidding and fascinating country.

[Sean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Definitely one of the lesser James Michener novels. An American embassy worker in Kabul, 1946 goes searching for a missing American girl who has run off with a Afghani. The book is vaguely interesting for its descriptions of an Afghanistan mostly untouched by Western influences, but little else. You're not going to remember any of the characters. There is exactly one gripping scene, when the protagonist witnesses a adulterous woman stoned to death by a mob in Kandahar. Also, the book has a fairly nuanced treatment of the Islamic mullahs, who are portrayed as the progressive element in Afghan culture - very unlike most modern depictions of the Taliban.

It is funny to think Michener was considered shockingly liberal by the standards of the 1950s. His books are completely retrograde by today's standards (ask my wife about how Michener treats his female characters). Literary qualities aside, Michener's novels (particularly the early ones) serve as a very interesting signpost in the development of Western thought over the past seventy-five years. This was what liberal, middlebrow literary culture looked like prior to the great cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. His books are totally free of the identity politics that dominates the cultural conversation today, for instance (he has "Caravans"' protagonist refer to certain practices in Afghan culture as "disgusting sodomy" without blinking - try finding a modern New York Times bestseller that does that!)

Moving on, one of the most interesting books Michener wrote was "The Drifters", which is about the emerging hippie and anti-war subculture in 1968 America and Europe. It's not a great book, but it is rather unique as a picture of the 1960s youth culture from the perspective of someone we would now call a member of the WASP Establishment (Michener was born in 1907, so was sixty-one at the time he wrote The Drifters). Although Michener was never a great writer, he was a pretty fair one, and attempted to record objectively what he saw as the new cultural consensus emerging from the death of the Establishment in 1960s America.

Post-Boomer generations in the West have grown up with that consensus, first expressed by the 1960s youth culture and then the subsequent rights movements - sexual liberation, feminism, gay rights, etc. Almost all literature produced since then either takes these ideas and assumptions for granted (or attacks them without quarter). For intelligent members of the Millennial generation, who have grown up in a world of rape culture, Whiteness Studies departments in universities, and Presidential proclamations celebrating GLBT Pride Month, reading Michener's books can help us realize that once upon a time, not so long ago, such cultural events would have been considered not just wrong, but totally unthinkable. Reading Michener's books, among others, can help us critically look at our own unquestioned assumptions about how the world should work.

That's a lot to take out of middlebrow novels like "Caravans", but since the plot and characterization is so thin, you might as well focus on their place in recent history rather than their actual literary quality.

[Jeremy Mathiesen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greetings, adventure seekers, from the treacherous frozen north,

It's your weary, wrestling wordsmith here with a great recommendation for you.

I recently read James Michener's Caravans, published in 1963. I'm a big fan of historical fiction. I always see so many similarities between the historical fiction and the fantasy I read.

In my mind, I always lump R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones in with Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth Series. Both have nobles battling for power, characters with swaying morals, the grim realities of medieval life and romantic love stories woven within. The only real difference between the two series is that in the former there are Dragons and White Walkers, while in the later you learn about actual human history.

When I read Michener's Caravans, I constantly felt like I was walking through some alien, science-fiction, fantasy world, but the story actually takes place in Afganistan in the 1950s. The plot, the characters, and the writing were like no others I had read before. The narrative is hardly a rollercoaster ride of action, yet it felt like the adventure of a lifetime. The mixture of cultures and contradictions were mind-boggling but familiar. You learn what Afganistan might have been, versus what it has become, and you start to understand a little of the country's origins.

After reading the book, the one question I had, that was never truly answered, was what were the German's doing in Afghanistan pre World War 2, and what were the American and Russians doing there post World War 2. I believe Afganistan might be the Middle East's Poland, in that it is a strategic hub, necessary to hold if you want to dominate that part of the world, but I'm still not completely confident in that conclusion.

Whether you're a history buff, or not, If you love adventure, I promise you'll love James Michener's Caravans.

Jeremy Mathiesen
Where Dark Tales Dwell

[Hock Tjoa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1963 and set in 1946-7 (before the Partition of India), this book reminds us what a great investigator and thoughtful writer Michener was. The story itself is outmoded and Michener does not show great insight into the psychology of his characters. But one wonders if anyone in "exceptional" America read it when Charlie Wilson went to arm the Taliban against the Soviet supported regime, when soldiers were sent after 9/11 only to remain there for a dozen years. The author described Kabul as resembling Palestine in Jesus' day, of death by stoning, of an eye for an eye and a life for a life, of the fate of the country to be determined when Afghanistan was left to itself, by the struggle between the many bearded men led by mullahs from the hills and the few young experts with degrees from Oxford, Sorbonne or MIT, the former making up 99 percent of the country.

"We are a brigand society and we murder our rulers," says one of the characters. There are striking descriptions of a violent and very different society that has very likely not changed much except that the munitions have multiplied, the mullahs reinforced with money and ideology from an even more fundamentalist source, and the young experts very likely all corrupted or disenchanted. It is a quiet book and does not address itself to the political issues. But, did anyone within the Beltway, ANYONE, read it?

[Don Fannin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this book in college 65 to 69. And I am rereading it now. I almost never read a book. But as the US got involved in Afghanistan it framed the way I thought about the country. As with all of Michener's good novels this is a story, a travelogue, social and political commentary, and history. To be honest the story is weak. It is good enough to keep you reading but not enthralling by any means. The travelogue is magnificent. Word pictures of a dusty dirty part of the world, primitive where a pack of wolves roam the streets of Kabul, hot dry deserts so dry that they suck the moisture from you and if you are in it for a couple of days with no relief it will mummify your body, the high green valleys of the Hindu Kush. I think his understanding of the political environment was almost prescient, he commented on the Ultra-conservative Mullahs challenging the government, almost predicted the Russian incursion. But showed the country to be a collection of tribes and area that were not under the rule of the government in Kabul. The history is mostly passing references to Alexander, the Mongols, Tamerlane, the British. If you like to take your knowledge in easy to read doses I highly recommend this book.

[Naeem · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the summer of 1973, I was caught in an apartment in the middle of Bangkok. With 100 degrees and 95% humidity 24 hours a day and my burning desire to exit the stage of my family life, I had only one release -- readying. I think I read half a dozen of Michener's books. Including this one on Afghanistan.

The book is, of course, outdated. It was published in 1962. But there is still a reason to read it. I think it reads well paired with Jason Elliot's An Unexpected Light -- the best travel book I have read, the best book on Afghanistan I have read, and the best book on Western desire I have read.

Michener is writing after WWII, when the pull of the Cold War is greatest and most silent. His treatment of Afghanistan is really a statement of Western desire for Afghanistan. Compare that to Elliot's travel book. He risks life and limb as a twenty something to walk through Afghanistan -- during the heat of its post-soviet exit.

The question of course is: Why risk it? We learn something about Western desire from Elliot. From Michener we learn how that desire -- the more real desire -- remains hidden in the glowing vapors of the Cold War.

[Kristopher Dukes · Rating 5 out of 5]

"One of the world's great cauldrons"

I had expected "Caravans" to read like the only other Michener book I've read, "Hawaii": a sweeping, multi-generational narrative holding together an entertaining history of the kingdom(s) turned state.

Instead, I lived a year of a young American man's life as he comes of age in post-WWII Afghanistan.

I can't remember the last time I wanted climb inside a novel. The prose is fluid and clean and perfect. The exotic scenes are richly described, the characters layered and living.

"Caravans" is wise and philosophical, but crisp as the night desert air he makes you breath, and as seemingly simple as the "primitive" culture main characters witness.

An epic journey.

[Elliot · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, despite its rather poor writing and characters that I really couldn't like. That might seem odd, but it was interesting to read about Afghanistan (even if fictionalized) in the late 40s from a writer in the early 60s. Michener knew an enormous amount about Afghanistan from many trips here before he wrote the book, and it really shows in his descriptions.

[Mary Reilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written in the early 60’s and probably wouldn’t have read it except for book club but the story totally captivated me. Michener is a great writer and this book at a little over 300 pages is way more manageable than his super long books. Even though so much has happened in Afghanistan since the story’s setting and the book was written, it’s amazing how much remains the same.

[Beverly Kent]

When I read all the other Michner books, I don't know how I missed this one. I have a vague memory that it was made into a movie (which wasn't very good), but the story has great appeal. A different time and surely a different place, but the plot is believable and a good summer read.

[Noel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this book twice and both times absolutely loved it. This is a well used mass media paperback.