IT IS SAID THAT a French writer in search of material for a novel has an
affair. An English writer goes on a journey.
In 1973, Paul Theroux, an American novelist living in London with a British
wife, chose the very English course of setting off on a train ride across
Asia. The trip yielded his breakthrough book The Great Railway Bazaar, which
became a model for a generation of travel literature.
Now Theroux has retraced his tracks in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star,
rattling by rail for 28,000 miles from London to Japan and back. In it, he
reveals that while he was riding the railways for the first book, his wife
had an affair.
The admission, after half a lifetime, casts his famous book in a new light. “I
concealed everything about my domestic turmoil,” he writes. “I made the book
jolly, and like many jolly books it was written in an agony of suffering,
with the regret that in taking the trip I had lost what I valued most: my
children, my wife, my happy household.”
Now 67, Theroux remains an inveterate traveller and railway enthusiast who
delights in “rubbing across the world”. On his latest adventure, he travels
across a bridge outside the Georgian town of Gori that was later blown up by
the Russians; attends a performance by an orchestra of land-mine amputees in
the jungle of Cambodia; and is offered a souvenir walrus penis in Tashkent.
In Tokyo, he visits a six-storey sex shop that sells fetish uniforms; he
inspects “very hairy” pornograpy in Budapest; and is offered $40 “boom-boom”
by a hooker in Hanoi.
But this time his book is not so much about the travelling as it is about the
author himself. Writing about travel has become a substitute for the
autobiography he once envisioned - the first volume entitled Who I Was and
the second I Told You So - but will now never write.
In person, Theroux is an amiable and chatty man, practiced at buttonholing
fellow wayfarers on his world travels. When we meet for curry (with gazpacho
soup) at the Taj Boston hotel, he reveals unselfconsciously that he was
forced to break his latest journey in Japan to return to Hawaii for a
colonoscopy. “Have you had a colonoscopy?” he asks gaily. Since his health
is fine, I decide to probe other avenues of inquiry.
Theroux is now just over twice the age he was when he set off for The Great
Railway Bazaar and, publishing his 42nd book, has matured as a writer.
“I found it hard to write about myself when I was in my thirties. I didn't
write anything in the first person that was about myself. I never wrote
about my family. I thought that writing comes from inside me but it's about
something outside. So when I wrote The Railway Bazaar it was unthinkable for
me to put my marriage or anything that personal in the book,” he says.
“When you get to a certain age, you realise it's all part of life's rich
tapestry. It's part of the story. That's quite a big difference ...” he
reflects. “I now have the perspective to be able to write about myself. You
have to live longer. Perhaps that's the lesson of the book, or the lesson of
life: You really have to live a little before you can understand the world.”
Travel writing is quintessentially about place. It is a three-dimensional
genre. Indeed, railway-travel writing - if there is such a sub-genus - can
seem almost two dimensional as the passenger watches the passing tableaux
with his nose pressed against the window.
What Theroux does in his latest book by revisiting his previous destinations
after 33 years is to add the fourth dimension: Time.
In its modest way, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star assays what Lawrence
Durrell achieved in his classic The Alexandria Quartet - a tetralogy that
Theroux adores. Inspired by Einstein's theory of relativity, Durrell's four
books approach the same events from different standpoints, with the final
volume looking back from the vantage point of time. Ghost Train attempts the
same feat.
“I got the idea when I went to Africa. I wrote Dark Star Safari. I went back
to a school I had taught in from '63 to '65 in Malawi,” Theroux explains. “I
went the long way. I started in Cairo and went all the way down to Cape
Town. I saw places I had known well and places I hadn't known at all. The
places I had known well were the places I really took a lot of pleasure in
writing about.”
Revisiting these once-familiar places taught a poignant lesson to Theroux, who
worked in the Peace Corps in Malawi in an age when President Kennedy had
called on Americans to “ask what you can do for your country”.
“People where saying, ‘In the next two or three years something is going to
happen'.” he says. “I would say, ‘No, it's not going to happen because I was
here 40 years ago and people were saying that then'.
“Forty years ago people were saying: ‘The five-year plan.' ‘We are going to
put a bridge up.' ‘Reforestation.' It ain't going to happen.
“You are going to have more disease, more illiteracy and more misery. You're
kidding yourselves.”
Theroux is sensitive to the accusation that he has just become a grumpy old
man disappointed in his youthful ideals. “The real fault with ‘time travel'
is that you can sound so fogeyish when you talk about Memory Lane or about
how things were,” he concedes. “I'd like to avoid that if possible.”
Yet the book bears witness to the eternal melancholy of the world. On his
first trans-Asia trip, he had to skip Cambodia because of the massacres of
Pol Pot and avoid China because of the impact of the Cultural Revolution. He
could visit Vietnam only with difficulty because of the war. This time
around, he has to hopscotch over Iran because of the Islamic revolution and
avoid Afghanistan and Pakistan altogether for his own safety.
“Older people,” he writes, “are perceived as cynics and misanthropes - but no,
they are simply people who have at last heard the still, sad music of
humanity played by an inferior rock band howling for fame.”
It is not that everything is going to pot. Theroux is impressed that Turkey,
which had once “seemed a distant and exotic country of frowning men and
enigmatic women, with unreliable telephones and simple roads”, is now “part
of the visitable world”. He remains dazzled by Japan, which “even long ago
... seemed to me the future”. He is positively enchanted by the Vietnamese
capacity for forgiveness. “We dropped 7 milion tonnes of bombs, 20 million
tonnes of defoliant. We didn't leave anything behind. And an American goes
there and they are saying: ‘Welcome, you want a massage?'” he says.
He fraternises with fellow writers: Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, Arthur C. Clarke
in Colombo and Haruki Murakami in Tokyo.
Elsewhere on his route, however, he encounters the “dystopia” of Turkmenistan,
where a dictator erects gold statues of himself in a poverty-stricken land;
the “open prison” of Burma; the “stubborn seediness” of the train to the new
EU entrant Romania; and a China where the only thing anyone cares about is
money. He doubts the supposed “Indian Miracle”, writing: “It seemed to me
that little had changed except the size of the population, an unfeedable,
unhous-able, uncontainable 1.3 billion people, not many of them saying ‘We
are modern now' ...”
Theroux is now married to a PR executive in Hawaii, where he raises honey
bees. He congratulates himself on his accomplished sons: Louis, 38, the TV
presenter; and Marcel, 40, a novelist. “They are doing things I
admire. That I would do myself,” he says.
But his latest trip reawakened memories of his first wife's infidelity. He remained
married to Anne Castle, a BBC executive, for almost another 15 years.
Although he admits he had also been unfaithful, he says her affair was “a
blow”. At one point, he threatened to kill the object of her attentions - a
subject he fictionalised in the novel My Secret History.
In Ghost Train, Theroux confides to Murakami that on his first journey he
called his wife on a bad line from Tokyo and realised from her frosty response
that she was with another man.
“How did you write your book?” the Japanese novelist asks.
“That's the thing, see? It was the cure. Writing the book fixed my head,”
Theroux replies.
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of The Great Railway Bazaar
by Paul Theroux
Hamish Hamilton, £20 Buy
the book
Extract from The Great Railway Bazaar (1975)
At its eastern limit the Trans-Siberian Express is a stale-smelling Russian
ship that sails two or three times a month out of the dust-storm smog of
Yokohama, through the windy Tsugaru Straights and the Sea of Japan - in
whose bucking currents whole sea-blizzards vanish - to Nakhodka, in freezing
Primorsk, a stone's throw away from Vladivostok. It is the only way west to
Nakhodka, the pneumonia route through gales to the rail head. Like the
train, the ship follows Soviet custom: it is riddled with class distinctions
so subtle, it takes a trained Marxist to appreciate them. I was in a
four-berth cabin at the waterline, one of the subclassifications of “Hard
Class” ... Bruce and Jeff, the Australians in the upper bunks, were nervous
about going to Siberia. Anders, a young Swede, carbuncular, with one of
those unthawed Scandinavian faces that speaks of sexual smugness and a
famished imagination, was in the bunk opposite. He listened to the
Australians, and when he said, “Hey, I hear it's cold in Siberia,” I knew it
would be a rough crossing.
Extract from Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008)
Rolling through the deepening snow - the effect of Lake Baikal - I spent the
day writing about my father and thinking how nothing had changed on the line
since I'd last taken it, thirty three years ago. The train was still a big
clanking antique, the food was still filthy, the trackside villages were
still collections of wood-burning bungalows. The railway personnel,
especially the women, were diligent about knocking the ice out of the drains
with a long-handled axe and keeping the samovar going, but apart form that,
there was no service to speak of. They were inattentive to passengers, but
scrupulous about standing at attention in uniform by the coach at every
stop.
