by Laurence Bergreen.

Knopf. 415 pages. $28.95.

BY TONY LEWIS
Special to the Journal

Marco Polo is one of those historical characters who seem half real, half mythological. Like Attila or Alexander, or other larger-than-life figures we’ve known since junior high school, familiarity has led to blurring and even disbelief, turning what was once startlingly real into the likes of Paul Bunyan.

In Marco Polo: from Venice to Xanadu, Laurence Bergreen rescues his hero from this benign neglect and snaps the picture into sharp focus. In his recounting of these epic travels, Polo seems for us — as he once seemed for most of the known world — a real traveler with an appetite to match the grand sweep of his journey through Europe and across Asia.

Bergreen’s account, however, is more than just a retelling of the “Travels” and a re-historicizing of its central character. Marco Polo is a new take on Polo, a postmodern re-imagining that brings him to the land of the Mongols as a European and then follows him back home a quarter of a century later to Venice as a quasi-Asian.

This refashioning of his hero makes for fascinating reading. Unlike Wonderland’s Alice, who steps through the looking glass as a proper young Victorian and returns entirely unchanged, Bergreen’s Polo undergoes a slow, half reluctant transformation from Euro-centered Christian to someone “as eclectic as his mentor Kublai Khan in matters of faith” and with a belief system “as inclusive and porous as that of the Mongols.”

In other words, in this reading of Marco Polo’s travels, the hero undergoes the kind of change that the best travel writers always claim to have undergone — D.H. Lawrence in Sardinia, Henry Miller in Greece, Bruce Chatwin in Patagonia.

Polo, however, didn’t actually write his “Travels.” He narrated them to one Rustichello of Pisa, with whom he shared a jail cell after being captured at sea by the Genoese years after returning from Asia. Bergreen distinguishes between the romanticizing Rustichello and Polo, filtering the account through the lens of modern scholarship; what’s left seems carefully tested and credible.

And what a story it is. Bergreen’s Polo starts out as a “pious” young man, tagging along with father and uncle on their trading mission along what would become known as the Silk Road, and then matures, sexually, psychologically, emotionally. Taken with women he meets en route, startled by dress, food, climate, tried by mountains, steppes, deserts, he blossoms intellectually, rejecting alien notions and then trying them on for size and gradually liking the fit.

Unlike others who had traveled east before him, Marco Polo, Bergreen writes, “did not simply describe the Mongol way of life, he lived it,” at times seeing himself as a Mongol. Little wonder, then, that he considered Kublai Khan “the greatest leader in history.”

In Bergreen’s account of Polo’s life, we find a hero tailor-made for these perilous times — courageous, global, open, and respectful of all that is different.