Travel: Roger Took is described on the fly-leaf as "an art historian and museum curator", a description which, as one reads his story, comes to seem almost a sly joke, writes Michael Viney.
Historian he certainly is, and a sensitive soul as well, but his gift for adventure and tough-minded inquiry break right out of the stereotype, landing him, on occasion, in transgressions more appropriate to John Buchan, if not quite James Bond.
The setting is the north-western corner of Russia brought into the headlines as the Kola Peninsula by the tragedy of the Kursk nuclear submarine.
Officially, it is the Murmansk Oblast, its Arctic tundra coast still wired off from inspection by non-military visitors. Here, as Roger Took insisted on seeing for himself, rows of rotting submarines lie alongside the quays "like seals at rest". What took him originally to Russian Lapland, however, with rucksack and fishing rod, was the promise of the interior. In this last true wilderness of Europe, the skies are alive with falcons, forests are full of elk and reindeer, rivers run with a size of Atlantic salmon quite unknown around Took's home in west Mayo. In the scattered log cabins and conical tents of the reindeer herders, he developed a bond with the Saami ( as we should learn to call the Lapland people) that still draws him back to study their history, language and lifestyle. He is almost certainly the first foreigner since the Russian Civil War of 1918-20 to have explored the region so well.
None of the Scandinavian countries has been especially tolerant of the Saami race, and the Soviets were not alone in considering them illiterate, stupid and difficult to administer. They were force-fed a state culture, their children were virtually abducted into Russian schooling and their shamans were branded as "enemies of the people".
The first big intrusions on the Kola Peninsula followed the Civil War, when the first World War Allies fought the Bolsheviks alongside the "White" Russians south of the ports of Murmansk and Archangel. Took unravels the events of this crucial period, then traces the momentous development of the railways and the mines, largely with slave labour. The Kola Peninsula positively glitters with rare minerals: its phosphate deposits were vast enough to serve the Soviet farming collectives and the smelting of its nickel has spread pollution far beyond the borders with Finland and Norway.
Took's history lessons are spiced with modern insight, but it is his own blithe progress into discomfort and even real danger that sticks in the mind. His solitary forays into the closed and well-patrolled military zones along the coast, keeping off the skyline, illuminate an up-to-the minute review of naval decay and nuclear hazards. In the interior, he would travel anywhere with anyone as a harmless angliysky dzhentelman, and his encounters in vodka-sodden backwoods and remote villages contrast with shrewd and sad explorations of post-communist life in boom-town Murmansk.
Rich western tourists dip in and out of the Kola peninsula, flying in by helicopter to catch salmon on a fly while Saami fishermen are hunted as "poachers" on their own rivers. With the collapse of the old economy, the well-appointed icebreakers of Murmansk began to take tourists on trips to Siberia or the North Pole at $25,000 a head. Roger Took did things the hard, haphazard way and has revelled in keeping close to nature, including the simpler human communities fast vanishing from northern Europe.
Michael Viney is an Irish Times columnist and author
Running With Reindeer: Encounters in Russian Lapland. By Roger Took, John Murray, 365 pp. £18.99