Book Review

A long, sentimental journey

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: on the tracks of The Great Railway Bazaar

Travelling is a waste of time. Those who self-consciously travel (as opposed to those simply going from A to B) are an egotistical and superficial bunch, always passing through, never giving anything back to the places they greedily add to a list of "destinations" to be ticked off for after-dinner boasting contests. Travel writing is a genre that reflects and articulates this obnoxious self-indulgence. Consisting of a few clichés masquerading as cultural observations, it is the celebration of the traveller's ego rather than any meaningful interaction with different places and peoples. "Little better than a licence to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest, complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Munchausen's syndrome."

Well, if Paul Theroux says so, who are we to disagree? The opening paragraphs of his latest book are certainly dismissive of those who travel and, worse, who feel compelled to write about it. The point, however, is that this personal and literary self-deprecation acts as a preface to what is essentially a classic travel book, written by an author synonymous with the genre and whose works, along with those of Bill Bryson, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Eric Newby, are to be found in the section devoted to travel writing in every Waterstone's in the land. Does Theroux really believe that his preferred literary form is so despicable? Or is this implausible posture of self-criticism part of a wider meditation on what travel writing has to offer?

Certainly, much of Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is vaguely self-referential in tone. For a start, it follows that hoary old "in the footsteps" format, retracing parts of the train journey across Asia that Theroux immortalised in The Great Railway Bazaar. But here he is acutely aware of the dangers inherent in such a re-run, keen to avoid "the twittering of the nostalgia bore". If he is to look again at the places he visited 33 years before, it is not with nostalgia in mind, but rather with an unspecified curiosity to see how those places, and he himself, have changed over three decades.

That first book, we learn, was written against a background of personal turmoil and anxiety, the jollity of the narrative voice disguising "an agony of suffering". Today's Theroux is a different character altogether: older, wiser, happier, comfortably world-weary, but still curious.

Out of the neurotic young man of the 1970s has evolved an unflappable and congenial travel companion. This later Theroux can thus reflect on his former self as he revisits the significant sites of his previous life.

But it would be wrong to suggest that this is primarily a narcissistic exercise. The book is very largely about how the world - and the experience of travelling through it - has either changed out of all recognition (the ubiquity of the internet, mobile phones and other modern methods of communication) or remained disconcertingly the same (bad train food, Russian drunks, etc.).

Some countries that Theroux visited in the 1970s, such as Iran and Afghanistan, are now effectively off-limits, but a good deal of the journey he made can still be recreated with a view to seeing what transformations have been wrought by one-third of a century.

They are, of course, many. The Eurostar has replaced the ferry, while the fall of the Berlin Wall has done little, he suggests, to improve either Hungary or Romania. Istanbul, on the other hand, is seen to have shaken off its mood of decaying introspection to become a vibrant model of cultural diversity (at least until the next coup) and Ankara is surprisingly youthful in mood.

Theroux, like all travel writers, is drawn to the grotesque, and his itinerary offers plenty of examples. Weirdest of all is probably Turkmenistan, until recently the fiefdom of one of the world's most crackpot dictators. Burma is dreadful too, while the sanitised repression of Singapore repels Theroux, especially when he explores the local red-light district - a warren of brothels and massage parlours staffed  by non-Singaporeans from poorer parts of Asia.

The ubiquity of commercial sex is, it seems, one of the constants in Theroux's retraced journey, and it induces the same sort of queasy melancholy as the rampant poverty of those parts of India that are not hi-tech, or the fear read in the faces of Cambodian peasants. But real revulsion comes in his trip to the "killing fields" and to Phnom Penh's S-21 torture prison, where a description of interrogation techniques is alarmingly similar to the practice known currently as waterboarding.

Rather engagingly, Paul Theroux hates big cities such as Tokyo and Bangkok (but not Istanbul) and likes the little lost towns of the boondocks. He also likes trains - the preferred method of transport in this long, sentimental journey: the enforced intimacy, the sense of detched abandonment, the furtive pleasure of sitting opposite a backpacker who is reading one of his novels. What greater thrill for the egotistical travel writer?

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