Anthony Lane in Europe: “What Country, Friends, is This?”

Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 04.26.06 | 1:19 PM ET

He’s got a pretty good day job as a film critic for The New Yorker, but in the magazine’s current Journeys issue, Anthony Lane focuses his considerable talents on a story about traveling via Europe’s low-cost airlines. As usual, the London-based Lane is hilarious. “[T]he best thing to happen to Great Britain in the past decade is the increasing profusion of ways to get the hell out of the place,” he writes. And so he does, recapping a few of his excursions on the Continent, including a great opening sequence about flying to Vitoria-Gasteiz, a place he’d never heard of and had no idea where it was located. He did know, though, that he could pay for things with euros.

The name itself was mystifying, starting with a hint of the Iberian but veering off toward the crunchingly Teutonic; it sounded more like a rare medical condition than a popular holiday spot. (“Though left largely impotent by the onset of Vitoria-Gasteiz syndrome, he nonetheless enjoyed a varied social life.”)

Lane bumbles around for a bit in Vitoria-Gasteiz, baffled by the strange signs in a language he can’t place (“San Frantzisko Xabier Kantoia”), before he comes to realize he’s in a Basque region in northern Spain. This sequence, by the way, should be required reading for the American business traveler recently “lost” in China and the AP reporter who wrote about him.

Lane delivers plenty of laugh lines and great phrases (”...the road trip into town takes you along the Appian Way, whose rickety stones shook the bones of Julius Caesar”), but he also offers a pretty good exploration of what the rise of low-cost carriers like Ryanair and easyJet means for Europeans. About one of his trips, a jaunt to Italy, Lane writes:

Three things were notable about that trip. The seat cost me a dollar each way, plus taxes and airport charges. The tagliatelle ai funghi that I ate for dinner that night was better, and more seductively yolk-yellow, than anything I could have ordered in Britain. And the plane landed ahead of schedule on both legs of the journey. Given these virtues, the question has to be: why travel any other way? And, given the centuries of ethnic attrition, religious abrasion, and bloodily contested borders that make up the history of the Continent, do Europeans realize how blessed they are in the hops and skips that now allow them, for the cost of a T-shirt, to escape without censure from one country to the next? To have moved from the bleakness of sixty years ago, when millions of the dispossessed formed the floating detritus of the Second World War, to a time in which, Michael O’Leary told me, planeloads of Danes and Norwegians merrily fly to England just for a soccer match may sound like a trivial change, but of such trivia is our freedom composed.

Lane’s story, unfortunately, isn’t online on The New Yorker’s Web site.