I know Dervla Murphy has done this all over the place, but right at the start let me take my hat off to her. Travelling off the beaten track in the Balkans in a car is difficult enough. But doing it on a bicycle requires a fortitude possessed by only very few. This is ferociously mountainous country, and her particular route in the Western Balkans included some of the most daunting peaks. These have defeated many a four-stroke engine but, with the exception of one or two extreme occasions, Murphy's pedal power proved equal to them, writes Misha Glenny.
This territory is not just a physical challenge. On occasions, it is a wild environment where different standards and laws apply, as she discovered on the road from Shkodra to Pukë in northern Albania.
I am surprised nobody warned her against undertaking this stretch of road on her own. She was set upon three times by the children of remote mountain tribes and was lucky to get away with her life - she would not have been the first misguided traveller to meet her death in this isolated area.
None the less, the risk is worth it inasmuch that Dervla Murphy's observations on the Balkans are best when she reaches the more obscure, lonely or outlandish parts of the region, not just geographically but culturally as well. When she stays near the Montenegrin capital, Podgorica, she falls in with a bunch of hard-line Serb nationalists.
Usually she seeks out what those of us working in the Balkans call "the usual suspects", i.e. urbane city-dwellers whose attitudes can be clearly identified on Western liberal radar screens. But these Montenegrin Serbs provide a helpful contrast.
She finds it hard to disguise her contempt of their beliefs, but through this encounter she reveals one of the key components of contemporary Balkan culture - the residual if fading impact of a mountainous rural clan system on a process of modernisation and urbanisation within an impecunious, underdeveloped region.
I wish she would have persisted with her odd-ball contacts. In Kosovo's charming south-western town of Prizren, for example, there is a Turkish community known for its intellectual vitality. The Prizren Turks maintain a careful distance from their volatile compatriots in hell, the Serbs and the Albanians, and this vantage point affords them a comprehension that is uniquely illuminating.
In her conversations with a variety of nationalities from the former Yugoslavia and Albania (the word Balkans is a misnomer here as there are no Romanians, Greeks or Bulgarians in sight) as well as her meetings with members of the now pervasive international community, Murphy is often stuck in the paradigm of ethnic conflict and the issue of post-war reconciliation. This is partly because she steers her enquiries in that direction and partly because it is the language in which former Yugoslavs have learned to communicate initially with Western interlocutors.
It is when she starts considering the nature of international engagement in the former Yugoslavia that she begins to edge closer towards the truth. Yet, while she has diligently collected the pieces, she is at a loss to know how to assemble the puzzle.
One significant logical inconsistency underpins the book: she is trenchantly critical of NATO's attack on Yugoslavia, which she asserts was illegal and a text-book example of America's increasingly unbridled US militarism. Yet when in Bosnia, she clearly buys into the arguments that it was the absence of early Western military intervention that resulted in such a high death toll, and that when it first appeared in the shape of UNPROFOR, it refused to disobey its mandate (the real source of the problem) and engage in active conflict with the Bosnian Serbs and Croats. She may be advocating the use of NATO ground troops as opposed to the more cowardly air strategy used against Yugoslavia. But given the weight of this issue, she should spell this out. As a result, one comes away with the impression that Murphy disapproves of Western military intervention in principle, except when she feels otherwise.
TO be honest, these debates cover much well-trodden ground. Much more vital is the issue of the economic reconstruction of the Balkans. If this project fails, then conflict, either social or ethnic, will return to the region. Dervla Murphy's shrewd description of the International Community in all its various forms amounts to a very serious indictment of its operations in the former Yugoslavia. Bosnia and Kosovo alone have accounted for billions of dollars in Western aid, and yet their legal economies remain lifeless.
These western protectorates, ghostly reincarnations of Habsburg rule, have created a system of aid dependency in Bosnia and Kosovo that is little short of catastrophic. It encourages corruption and criminality. It divides society along generational and gender lines. And it reinforces stereotypes of an allegedly indolent and duplicitous Balkan mentality. It is not that the efforts of the international community are per se bad; it is that, despite experience in so many other underdeveloped regions, its now legion agencies still have no understanding how to deliver aid effectively.
In the Balkans, these problems are exacerbated by the exceptional bureaucratisation of the Western presence, which Murphy sees only too clearly.
Dervla Murphy has found a lot of unpleasant but familiar gunk as she pokes through the embers of chaos. More distressing than this, however, is that she finds no evidence of the phoenix. True - there isn't much.
But nestled in relative obscurity, new forms of co-operation are slowly emerging in the former Yugoslavia, which I think would both surprise and encourage the author. If she had visited Gnjilane in eastern Kosovo, for example, she would have found a young, visionary mayor, Lutfi Haziri, who has succeeded in bringing an end to the murder and intimidation of the local Serb population. In Belgrade earlier this year, the director of the Serb National Library hosted a meeting of his counterparts from throughout the former Yugoslavia; he opened by offering an unreserved apology on behalf of Serbia for the barbaric destruction of the University Library in Sarajevo. Croatia and Serbia are normalising their relations, while reform politicians from all the Balkans are slowly developing coherent regional policies that could educate the European Union and other agencies as to their real development needs.
This phoenix's egg is fragile, its protective shell barely formed. But poke gently among the embers and you will find it.
Through the Embers of Chaos: Balkan Journeys. By Dervla Murphy. John Murray.384 pp. £20 sterling
Misha Glenny's The Balkans ; Nationalism , War and the Great Powers 1804-1999 was published last year in paperback by Penguin