The Far-Farers: a journey from Viking Iceland to Crusader Jerusalem by Victoria Clark

A historic journey that took a thousand years

Thorvald the Far-Farer was a highly unusual Icelander. Rejecting the thuggish rough justice of pagan Viking gods, he converted to Christianity in the 990s, accompanied a missionary bishop and preached the gospel. Stoned, outlawed and even accused of homosexuality, he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Victoria Clark, fascinated by the journey, decided to do the same 1,000 years on, comparing the preoccupations of today's Europeans to those of the 11th century.

It's a wonderful idea, and Clark is herself a plucky "far-farer", taking a cargo ship from Reykjavik to Lubeck, roughing it on trains and buses in Italy, Albania and Greece, throwing a fit of hysteria to acquire a visa into Syria and getting into Jerusalem a few months before it became a no-go area.

She follows in the footsteps of a splendid range of characters: the child emperor Otto III, the saintly Adelbert, Countess Matilda of Tuscany, popes pious and perverted, sophisticated Byzantine emperors, cultured Arab emirs and brutal, even cannibal, Crusaders. On her way, she is helped by an almost equally interesting assortment of modern characters: an Icelander who has a museum of phalluses, a melancholic East German devoted to magnificently medieval Quedlinburg, ebullient Italians in Bari, an amorous Syrian who chases her round Krak des Chevaliers, the great Crusader castle.

What interests Clark is religion: its all-encompassing importance in Thorvald's time and its dramatic decline in Western Europe today. As well as visiting churches, mosques and synagogues and sitting through two audiences with Pope John Paul, she meets committed Christians of different persuasions: a young French monk in the Taizé community; the Orthodox Archbishop Yannoulatos; Padre Domenico, a lone Italian priest in Antioch; and Sister Rita, a Palestinian nun.

It's a noble theme. The trouble is that Clark seems to have cooked up a Grand Universal Theory before her journey and is hell-bent on proving that the 11th century "laid the essential groundwork for the rest of the second millennium with its eventual removal of religion from its central place". Proving this leads to laboured links, unconvincing parallels and ostrich-like reactions to the many intelligent thinkers she meets, who, with remarkable courtesy, totally disagree with her.

By the last page, she has settled for the somewhat facile conclusion that "it may be that the terrible lesson Western Europe's 11th century taught us is that man is a greater danger to himself than the hostile universe will ever be", never more so than when "motivated by blind belief in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Communism, National Socialism or global capitalism, all faces of the opposite of love, egoism".

Never mind. It is not the moral meaning Clark imposes on her journey, but the journey itself that makes her book fascinating. Stuffed with funny and almost photographically vivid portraits of the citizens of Europe today, and interwoven with startling brief lives of a clutch of formidable men and women from the past, it makes us realise how similar humans of every time and place can be.