Books
Old haunts
by Neil Cross
Paul Theroux retraces his most famous journey.
In a long and fruitful career, Paul Theroux has picked up an encrustation of myth: he’s caustic, dyspeptic, a curmudgeon – a grump huddled on a filthy train en route to some obscure Chinese industrial port, grousing about the world and all its inhabitants.
Such misconceptions arose because Theroux doesn’t fit comfortably within the world of travel writing, which is a debased and sentimental form of literature.
Travel writing isn’t about the travel, it’s about the traveller. Unless that traveller is an extraordinary witness, the travelogue is an exercise in banality: an attempt by the uninteresting to mooch on the allure of the exotic.
Theroux does have a healthy writer’s ego, but much of his output seems preoccupied by satirising it. Few writers have been so hard on themselves – as a dip into My Other Life, his fictionalised autobiography, will attest. Yet few writers have been so widely accused of arrogance.
True, he’s not shy about recognising the myths that cling to him. It’s not uncommon, for example, for him to document encounters with people seen reading The Great Railway Bazaar. This is the narrative that made him famous – an account of a four-month train journey through Europe, across Asia and the Middle East and returning on the Trans-Siberian Railway – and for which he remains best known.
But Theroux is always dryly teasing, seeming to aggrandise only to deflate himself with a punch line: people read his book, he bathes in the moment; they silently move their lips, seem enraptured. Then they put the book aside, leave it in hostels, wonder aloud if the author has written anything else. Theroux knows The Great Railway Bazaar defines him; but it’s an incomplete and ephemeral definition – and a perpetual memento mori, because even successful books do not secure immortality. Time passes like a train. This is the opposite of conceit.
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is a new book that’s partly about that old book. At 66, Theroux decides to retrace the itchy heels of the 33-year-old who wrote The Great Railway Bazaar.
In an arresting passage in the opening pages, he recounts the surprising misery of The Great Railway Bazaar’s creation. His wife resented him leaving:
And although I did not write about it, I was miserable when I set off from London, saying goodbye to this demoralised woman and our two small children [ … ] I was at my wit’s end on the trip. I felt insane when I got home: I had not been missed: I had been replaced.
In his absence, his wife had moved a lover into the family home. Theroux’s marriage recovered, albeit temporarily, but from the outset The Great Railway Bazaar destroyed as it gave.
Because the world is not set fast, Ghost Train’s route can only approximate the one taken in 1974 – Theroux avoids Iran and Iraq – but the narrative is richer for it. Theroux’s trip through the little-known la-la land of Turkmenistan is one of his finest chapters; his peregrination through Turkey leaves one with an unexpected optimism for the future of us all; his -passage through India is dizzying and claustrophobic. Throughout, he encounters the phantom of his younger self – this broke and miserable young man, not yet famous, embarked on the trip that will make him. Ghost Train is about continuity, change, decay, progress and the tragedy of wisdom – that, because it belongs to the old, it goes unheard.
Of all Theroux’s work, I’d considered Dark Star Safari – his account of travelling on foot from Alexandria to Cape Town – to be his finest. But Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is perhaps even better. In part a revisitation, it’s a culmination, too.
Naturally, there’s a caveat. You have to like the man in order to travel with him for this distance, over this many pages – and Theroux can be dry, pricklish and ironic. He gets weary: he can snipe and carp about … well, the kind of things you’d carp about, too, on a long and uncomfortable train journey taken at the age of 66, through foreign countries fondly recalled, transformed by the passage of 33 years.
But he’s no cynic, which is the usual and least accurate of the charges laid against him. He’s a romantic. He never gives up looking. His intermittent disgust, his aggravation, his discontent, is a function of hope.
The last, moving paragraph of this fine book by this fine writer might function as a kind of lifetime’s manifesto – the kind of hard-earned wisdom to which we should listen, but probably won’t: the world is in a parlous state. In some ways, it’s getting better; in many more, it’s getting worse. But the going is still good.
GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR, by Paul Theroux (Hamish Hamilton, $37).
