Thoughs on travel memoir v literary fiction - and A Time of Gifts

Read a little more, including Jan Morris's smart intro. to A Time of Gifts (1977), about Patrick Leigh Fermor - enough to see that he published about a dozen books (none of them known to me) and that the 2nd and 3rd volumes of the travel memoir that Gifts begins were published many years later - in fact vol 3 was published posthumously (PLF died in 2011). Morris notes that Gifts is one of the few travel memoirs written from a long perspective - about 40 years after PLF's trek as a teenager across Europe to Constantinople. This time gap gives the memoir an unusually and effective double-perspective, as we see his travel events with immediacy, thanks to his incredible recollection of detail, and sometimes direct and unmediated - through passages from a contemporaneous notebook that he recovered while writing the memoir, and also w/ a sense of maturity, wisdom, and perspective. Morris is right that the narrative itself sometimes strains credibility - I can imagine that a 60-year-old would have such detailed observations about culture and history, but hardly a 19-year-old; in other words, many of the observations that PLF puts into them ind of his youthful begin probably were not developed in his mind until much later. But that doesn't really matter - the memoir reads well on the whole, and includes at times brilliant passages (though by the end I was a bit overwhelmed by military history and cathedral architecture). Travel memoirs are like novels w/out plot; the narrative takes the shape of the journey, rather than developing from conflicts and incidents perpetrated by the characters as they interact and evolve over time. Generally, a novel has a shape, an arc so to speak, and a conclusion; a travel memoir develops along a geographical line - it's one-dimensional rather than 3-dimensional - and ends at a geographic terminus rather than at a resolution of conflict (or not). That said, travel memoirs are more accessible than literary fiction, in that their dimension and scope is evident from the outset and, aside from the author's liberties with fact, readers don't judge the characters and events for likelihood - the more extreme the likelihood, in fact, the better. I haven't read enough to judge, but Morris certainly has and I accept her assessment of PLF - a travel writer of the first order.