THE LAST MIGRATION (343 pp.)—Vincent Cronin—Dutton ($4.50).
A fruitfull countrey, inhabited with pasturing people, which dwell in the Summer season upon mountains, and in Winter they remoove into the valleyes . . . in carravans . . . of people and cattell, carrying all their wives, children and baggage. . .
This Elizabethan description of nomadic Persians (from Hakluyt's Principal Voyages) would have been accurate in the time of Herodotus (circa 484-425 B.C.) and was still accurate in A.D. 1926, when Persia's modern-minded Reza Shah Pahlavi began his reign, set about freeing the women of their veils, ordered the men into Western suits and decided that nomadic existence was "a blot on his progressive country." Harried by the Shah's troops, the nomadic tribes "settled," but in 1941, when Reza was forced to abdicate after the Allies moved into Persia, the tribes went back to their ancient way of life. They stuck to it until a few years ago, when British Author Vincent (The Wise Man from the West) Cronin, who visited the Persian interior in hope of taking part in a spring migration of one tribe, found that its nomadic way had finally petered put. The Last Migration, largely based on interviews with tribal leaders, is Cronin's story of these nomads' decline and fall.
Idyl's End. Author Cronin scarcely lives up to Herodotus or Hakluyt, for nowadays history is considered more "creative" if it is presented as fiction. Cronin has recast historic events in a form which the Persians call dastan, i.e., "near-factual history, almost myth." But the hero of this dastan will be remembered: Ghazan Khan, nomad chief of a tribe that Cronin calls the Falqani and a man hopelessly caught in the paradoxes of progress.
In youth Ghazan was trained by a mullah in the tenets of Mohammedanism, but at 15 he was sent to school in Switzerland; now he tries to give his people the best of both worlds, only to find—like so many other men of good will in the East—that such an attempt can easily lead to tragedy. When Ghazan gets wind of the fact that the Persian army is planning once again to resettle his people, he leads them into the uplands for the summer, and they resume their way of life—shearing their sheep, weaving cloth and dazzling-colored rugs. Ghazan knows that this summer idyl cannot last and that by fall he must lead his tribe back to its winter grazing grounds, to face the 20th century in the shape of the modern Persian army. Then, to fight or not to fight, that is the question to which Ghazan desperately seeks an answer.
Nothing is as it seems. He admires the West and progress. But the West's emissaries—an international aid mission—are uncomprehending and horrified by his tribe's backwardness, illiteracy and impractical preoccupation with poetry; civilization's missionaries depart, leaving behind two artificially inseminated ewes and predicting bigger and better herds, which the Falqani do not want. Throughout his country, Ghazan seems to see only a bizarre blend of ancient Eastern evils and too-hasty Westernization—hunger and corruption, opium smokers in grey flannel suits, profiteering officials who "displayed the refrigerator in their drawing room like a Chinese lacquer cabinet."