Book Review – Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls by Marco Polo

To view this book as an actual book misses the mark. Penguin Publishing has taken a letter to a king from the explorer Marco Polo as he accounts his travels in India. Marco Polo isn’t an author of a non-fiction story set to transport the reader to a semi-mystical realm of serpents and pearls. This is an explorer trying to get across the idea of a foreign land filled with foreign people with a foreign culture that is on the border to the West and desired for the wealth of trade it was bringing.

The studded way of Polo may through one off “I will tell you…”, “Let me tell you…”, “Another thing…”. You don’t get any fluff. What you do get is someone trying to relate the oddness to a king who isn’t an absolute monarch and who has a higher calling to subjects and kingdom and God and who is trying to amass wealth and power like any sovereign at the time. And he is able to relate because his comments of the kings and people in the area are focused on the subjects, kingdom, God(s), religions, and cultures in the area. Polo is giving a record to those who would most relate to the subjects he covered.

So, this review isn’t about the wax poetic – or lack thereof – of Polo’s account. But it was an interesting account of an outside perspective doing the best job he could to describe accurately with what he saw. And for that, I quite enjoyed the tale.