In 1973, a moderately successful fiction writer set off from London on a train
journey through Asia to Japan and back via Siberia; the trip was to be
immortalized in The Great Railway Bazaar. Thirty-five years on and decorated
in prizes, Paul Theroux is arguably even better known as a travel writer
than as a novelist. His Asian train odyssey was followed by similar passages
through China, Patagonia, Africa, the Pacific Islands and Britain. Perhaps
he thought he’d seen it all: no less inquisitive, though considerably
goutier, Theroux recently decided to take the trip again – to become a
“spectre” in the scenes of his former life. This time around he has two
distinct, if paradoxical, advantages: fame (along the way he looks up a
variety of interesting friends) and invisibility (“the usual condition of
the older traveller”). Wealth is another boon, though Theroux does his best
to ignore this: “luxury is the enemy of observation”.
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star follows in roughly the same tracks as its
parent route. Iran and Afghanistan are off-limits, so Theroux arrives in
Tashkent via Georgia and then cheats by flying to Amritsar in India. Last
time around, he’d had to avoid Baluchistan (Pakistan) because of an
insurrection; Vietnam was split, Laos had a monarchy and Afghanistan was a
crumbling hippy haven. Ditching the latter this time was doubtless no great
loss. “The food smells of cholera, travel there is always uncomfortable and
sometimes dangerous, and the Afghans are lazy, idle, and violent”, Theroux
had written in The Great Railway Bazaar. Now he reserves his distaste for
China and, to a lesser extent, India. He quickly flees the former (“ugly and
soulless, China represented the horror of answered prayers”) but retains a
sickened fascination for India, which he perceives as trapped between
hypermodernity and medievalism. In Delhi, he discovers a “crisis of
old-fangledness”, and in Bangalore a monster: “the place had not evolved; it
had been crudely transformed – less city planning than the urban equivalent
of botched cosmetic surgery”. He finds walking on the pavements impossible,
“a monotony of frotteurism” all about him, and human life in the style of
Hieronymus Bosch. He wryly observes the effect that this has on the
populace: “there is a freight of detail in Indian life . . . that turns
Indians into monologuers”. Looking down at a piece of rotting fruit,
blackened by voracious insects, Theroux spots a metaphor: “a little world of
hunger obscured by its eaters”.
He is similarly appalled, but far more seduced, by the “Stans”, in particular
Turkmenistan, for which “the chummy term ‘Absurdistan’” seems “too
forgiving, too definable, too comic”. The recently demised Saparmurat
Niyazov (“Leader of All the Turkmen”) was still very much alive during
Theroux’s visit, and his presence hung heavy. Niyazov banned beards, gold
teeth and ballet (not to mention NGOs); he created a cult of the mother,
renamed ketchup and wrote a national bible called the Rukhnama which his
people were encouraged to quote from (“a hefty-sized farrago of personal
history, odd Turkmen lore, genealogies, national culture, dietary
suggestions, Soviet-bashing, insane boasting, wild promises and his own
poems”). The capital, Ashgabat, is a “city without benches” (“the subtle
message being: Keep walking”) plonked in a “landscape like cat litter”.
Theroux causes a diplomatic incident following a “harmless pep talk” to some
journalists in a hotel and swiftly moves on. Nevertheless, he is humbled by
the generosity of citizens. “Lovely people, awful place”, he concludes.
Theroux writes well on assorted autocrats. In Uzbekistan, he muses on the less
whimsical but more ruthless Islom Karimov; and in Myanmar on the
well-executed tyranny of the ruling junta, which has created a country
“exceptional in its decrepitude and low morale, its inefficiency almost
total”. In Cambodia, he sees a country still riven with the scars of the
Khmer Rouge. While Niyazov tried to make a nation in his image, Pol Pot
“remained excessively secretive, an enigma even to his followers”. Lee Kwan
Yew in Singapore, meanwhile, is “more like the head of a cult than a
political leader”. Theroux revisits the city-state in which he once worked
as a teacher: “Little tinky-winky Singapore was unrecognisable . . . . No
one was fat. No one was poor. No one was badly dressed”. Its citizens,
however, apparently remain in thrall to Lee, whose despotism, though more
enlightened than Niyazov’s, is no less lunatic (he has, notoriously, banned
chewing gum) and, for Theroux, even more insidious: “Singaporeans’
personalities reflect that of the only leader most of them have ever known,
and as a result are notably abrasive, abrupt, thin-skinned, unsmiling, rude,
puritanical, bossy, selfish and unspiritual”.
Theroux can seem many of these things himself. He is brashly nosy, bluntly
sure, and frequently allows his personality to take precedence in his
narrative. This is, of course, what makes him an excellent travel writer;
but it can also grate. He opines loudly on Kurdish separatism to people who
know more than him and wrongs himself with tabloid-like conclusions (“most
of the world is worsening”). He likes his own jokes a little too much (“At
the sight of this filth and disorder, my spirits rose”) and can sometimes
seem patronizing, not least when he is rather too charmed by Indians’
apparently outdated use of words such as “audacious”, “thrice” and
“redoubtable”. Part of his problem with Singapore is that he is still
persona non grata there (his 1973 novel, Saint Jack, has only recently been
unbanned). This makes for awkward encounters with Singaporeans but surely
Theroux could have been a little more generous. As for self-regarding, he
enjoys nothing more than to find fellow travellers reading Paul Theroux. He
also likes to name-drop.
Fortunately, Theroux has many good names to drop in on. In Turkey, he meets up
with Orhan Pamuk, with whom he chats about the sex lives of writers. He
encounters Prince Charles in India (“You came to the premiere of the film of
my book”) and has tea with the Maharaja Gaj Singh II. In Sri Lanka he pops
round to Arthur C. Clarke (also now deceased) and finds the writer in
eccentric form (“Do you play table tennis? Table tennis is the one sport I
excel in. My greatest hobby”). In Japan he goes walking with Pico Iyer and
discusses travel writing (“The thing that bothers me is that Chatwin never
travelled alone.” “Jan does.” “So does Jonathan.” “But Redmond doesn’t.”
“Naipaul never did.”). Ghost Train to the Eastern Star has some nice
literary tittle-tattle. In Russia, Theroux learns that Chekhov had a chip on
his shoulder about Perm – a city the playwright later used as an exemplary
setting for bourgeois airlessness in The Three Sisters. “[Chekhov] was
turned away from a building because he was wearing the wrong clothes”, a
proud Permian reveals. “He never forgave them for this.” When Theroux meets
up with Haruki Murakami in Tokyo, he finds the novelist-cum-jogger in
gossipy form. “When Truman Capote came here, he had sex with [Yukio]
Mishima”, Murakami tells him. “That’s not in Capote’s biography”, answers
Theroux. “It’s not in any book that I know” is the reply – “But it
happened”.
In one of the book’s more eyebrow-raising scenes, Murakami and Theroux embark
on a tour of Tokyo’s sex industry. The two authors stroll around, examining
gag-balls, dildos and French-maid outfits. It is unclear how often the
Japanese author indulges in such sightseeing, but for Theroux it is integral
to the travelling experience: “a country’s pornography offers the quickest
insight into the culture and inner life of a nation”. Tokyo, it seems, is
all about bondage with schoolgirls (“young women whom . . . only nerds could
dominate”). Theroux seeks out porn in Budapest (“grubby stuff . . .
with a sideline in gay cruelty and every German perversion”) and
government-licensed whorehouses in prudish Singapore. He talks to a sex
worker in Istanbul (“You have family?”), a procuress in Mumbai, and a girl
in Thailand working as a prostitute (unbeknown to her family) to pay for the
education of her sister.
Theroux is not afraid to delve into the underbelly. He also remains acutely
aware of how a culture can define itself by what it loathes. He encounters
Russophobia in Georgia (this before the recent invasion), Sinophobia in
Myanmar, and hatred of the United States pretty much everywhere: “On my trip
of 28,000 miles and hundreds of encounters, I met two people who supported
the American president”. These are a civil servant in Baku, motivated by his
hatred for Iranians, and a Hindu in India, motivated by his hatred for
Muslims. Theroux carries with him his own prejudices, but his wit and ear
for dialogue are bound up in his chauvinism. On one particularly memorable
occasion, Theroux (who is no Anglophile) meets a blustering Brit in
Thailand, with an over-inflated sense of his ability to speak the lingo:
“You really should learn the language, old chap. Makes life so much easier.
Kon-kap. Bop-bop. Bumpity-bip”.
In 1973, Theroux had wanted to redefine the travelogue. “The travel book was a
bore. A bore wrote it and bores read it”, he comments in his new
introduction to the reissue of The Great Railway Bazaar. Notwithstanding the
dishonour done by this attitude to his various illustrious predecessors (he
does acknowledge Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Trollope as exceptions), Theroux
has over the years brought to the genre an idiosyncratic brand of dry
observation and honest complaint – an attention to the “delay” and
“nuisance” intrinsic to the whole experience. Today, his approach seems
pleasingly anachronistic. There are no gimmicks – no milk floats to ride or
fridges to transport – no hare-brained schemes or impossibly hidden
treasure. Instead, there are encounters, observations and, sometimes,
wisdom. Paul Theroux is chiefly interested in the fluidity of human life,
and one gets the feeling that he could write about the same journey for a
third time and not be boring. He moves about, looks around him and tells us
what he sees and feels. Few do it better.
Paul Theroux
GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR
On the tracks of “The Great Railway Bazaar”
485pp. Hamish Hamilton. £20.
978 0 241 14253 0
Toby Lichtig is a freelance writer and editor living in Lisbon.
