Riding the Rails with Paul Theroux.

Paul Theroux first came to my attention a few years ago when I picked up one of his later travelogues, Last Train to Zona Verde, which chronicled his trip (mostly) by train from Cape Town up the western coast of southern Africa through Namibia, detouring into Botswana, and eventually into Angola. It was weirdly fascinating, no less so that this older white American would enter territory where he would stand out in the worst ways, potentially attracting unfavorable attention, and that he had to abandon his original plan of traveling all the way up the coast and inland into Mali once he reached the Angola-DRC border. It’s a grim trip, where the curmudgeonly Theroux documents the bleak poverty he encounters at each stop, noting environmental degradation and tourism aimed at westerners who have too money and think that poor is cool, while, in my view, missing what his own privilege and perspective bring to his observations.

Several readers suggested I go back and read Theroux’s better-known, earlier travelogues, especially The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express, both of which appear in an e-book trilogy called Riding the Rails With Paul Theroux, which I got on sale for the Kindle for $4 and which includes the later book Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, where he recreates the trip of the first book thirty years later. They are long, meandering, fascinating, and unstinting; they don’t cast Theroux in a particularly good light; yet they also open a window on places the vast majority of us will never see, from Tashkent to Baku to Santa Ana to the Khyber Pass, exposing cultures, foods, and traditions that remain ‘foreign’ to the west even in this era of globalization.

The Great Railway Bazaar made Theroux’s name as an author, especially of this very specific style of book: a non-fiction narrative work that follows the author on a trip where he documents the mundane, not merely the extraordinary. Much of the content of all three books revolves around the modest inconveniences and occasional joys of traveling in proximity to other people, including the varying customs of folks traveling by train in different countries and the ways in which train travel becomes a signal of economic status in those cultures. This first book chronicle’s Theroux’s trip by train from Paris through Istanbul, Teheran, India, Burma, and Thailand, eventually putting him in South Vietnam (after the U.S. withdrawal, before the fall of Saigon), after which he flies to Japan and returns home via the Trans-Siberian Railway. The journey, we later learn in the third volume, cost him his marriage – he returned home to find his wife, who opposed the trip, has taken up with another man – but made him a literary star.

The second book follows Theroux from Chicago through Texas, Mexico, most of Central America – twice he has to take to the skies, skipping Nicaragua as too dangerous and jumping past gaps in the rail lines – into South America, eventually ending up in Esquel, a small inland city in Patagonia, on the Argentine side of the Andean border with Chile. The third book sees him revisit the first trip 33 years later, but due to massive political changes, he heads north to avoid Iran and Afghanistan, passing through the Caucasus, Turkmenistan (shortly before the death of its deranged dictator Saparmurat Niyazov), and Uzbekistan. He remarks at length on the changes he’s seen in India’s big cities, while places like Sri Lanka and especially Burma (now Myanmar) have barely changed, before visiting Cambodia for the first time since the Khmer Rouge fell and Singapore for the first time since his novel Saint Jack was banned there, finishing his trip again via Japan, Vladivostok, and Moscow. (He flew from Tashkent to Amritsar, lacking a ground route through Tajikistan.) His description of these changes blends the factual and his own disdain for pretty much all of it: he denigrates Indian megacities for their unfettered growth and evidence income inequality, then derides the next two countries he visits for their failures to thrive.

By far, the most entertaining parts of Theroux’s books are his encounters with countries furthest from my own experiences as a traveler; I have been to over 20 countries, but only one is outside of North America or Europe (Taiwan), and all of my visits to developing countries except one were for tourism. I’m probably never going to Azerbaijan or Turkmenistan, and the odds of me visiting El Salvador or Honduras are extremely low given their current levels of political turmoil and violence. He comments on how “Considering their history – not only the riots, civil wars, and revolutions, but also the uproarious earthquakes and incessant vulcanism – it is a wonder that (Central American countries) exist at all and have not furiously vanished beneath the sea,” an amusing sentiment made more so by the flips in fate in the intervening four decades. Nicaragua was too dangerous to visit, so he went to El Salvador. Colombia and Costa Rica have developed into fairly well-off economics, at least by the standards of their neighbors. Turkey raced forward between his two visits, only to regress rapidly since Ghost Train was published. He visited South Vietnam a year before the north invaded and unified the country; now he compares his visits to Saigon and Hue, while visiting Hanoi for the first time. He visits the famous temples at Angkor Wat for the first time since the Khmer Rouge came and went; and the secret red light district of Singapore for the first time since its autocratic government banned his novel Saint Jack. He passes through the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, which has almost no Jews living in it, of Russia, a place I didn’t even know existed before reading this book. So much of the pleasure of these books is Theroux visiting places I’ll never go, sometimes making me envious, other times letting me know I don’t need to feel that bad about missing them.

Theroux’s status as an author stood him in good stead even on his first trips, as the last two books include encounters with some very famous authors he meets on his sojourns. He spends days with Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires, meets up with Orhan Pamuk – about to win the Nobel Prize for Literature – in Istanbul, goes to the home of Arthur C. Clarke – who’d be dead within two years – in Sri Lanka, and travels a bit with Haruki Murakami in Japan. Each of these conversations feels like one of those essays I’d find in the New Yorker and would share with you all in a Saturday post; Borges and Clarke really come to life on these pages, while Murakami comes off as reticent and pensive, although I suppose that’s unsurprising.

Theroux, though, doesn’t come off very well in his books. He doesn’t seem to like other people very much, especially not people working jobs he views as menial. He might be a little bit racist. The first two books in particular stand out for Theroux’s stereotyping of various peoples and overemphasis on physical characteristics, including skin color, while the third is more muted but still has his voice and, with it, his obvious tendency to create a clear distinction between himself and anyone he deems as ‘other.’ He’s also more than a little bit sexist, and some of his commentary on sex and the skin trade comes off as creepy even before you consider that he made the trip in the third book when he was about 65 years old. Some of the commentary in the first two books may have been acceptable in its time; much of this material in the third book was already cringeworthy in 2008, when it was published, and it’s all worse now.

There’s also something quaint about these books in the era of cheap air travel and, outside of Europe, very limited and/or expensive rail options. I could forgive Theroux’s act a bit, given the window on the world he opened and the existence of at least some self-deprecation. He’s also acutely aware of the poverty he sees, and understands his economic privilege even while othering so many of the people he encounters on the trains. There’s something quite admirable in his willingness to leap into these journeys, to travel to places most of us wouldn’t dare visit on our own for fear of disease or violence or simply the unknown. Even where the text hasn’t aged well, the voyages themselves justified the time.

Next up: Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars, winner of this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel.