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Readers go tripping with Paul Theroux

Author's latest tome echoes earlier writings about exotic destinations

By Bill Gallo, Special to the Rocky

Published August 21, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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Paul Theroux's latest book recreates the 28,000-mile trans-Asian journey he wrote about in "The Great Railway Bazaar" some 30 years ago.

Photo by Yingyong Un-Anongrak

Paul Theroux's latest book recreates the 28,000-mile trans-Asian journey he wrote about in "The Great Railway Bazaar" some 30 years ago.

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In the matter of Paul Theroux's on-the-edge "travel writing," which defies the very term, readers fall into two rough camps.

Seekers of beautiful sunsets, exotic uplift and bargain pottery from Ecuador dismiss him as a jaded cynic with no "sense of wonder." People looking for the reality of things, including the absurdities of local politics, the stench of corruption and flyspecks on the hotel wallpaper, have long since elevated Theroux into the top rank of clear-eyed literary travelers - right in there with Twain and Tocqueville, Nabokov and Bruce Chatwin.

"A travel book," Theroux wrote some years ago, "has the capacity to express a country's heart . . . but only as long as it stays away from vacations, holidays, sightseeing and the half-truths in official handouts; as long as it concentrates on people in their landscape and it includes the discomforts as well as the pleasures."

Theroux's provocative new volume, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, will by necessity take its place on the shelf next to the most renowned travel book of his early career. Ever the insatiable observer, Theroux here re-creates the 28,000-mile trans-Asian journey he chronicled three decades ago in The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). Some of his destinations are different this time around - you don't slip easily into Iran these days - and the world has changed profoundly since Theroux last visited places like war-ravaged Vietnam.

But the writer's method remains essentially the same. Keep your eyes open and take voluminous notes. Avoid all luxury: Go by rattletrap train, broken-down taxi and exhaust-coughing bus; walk till your mud-caked shoes wear thin. Trust in the will and the kindness of strangers. Never hesitate to drop in at a seedy brothel in Istanbul (where the author inadvertently brings a hooker to tears), or the killing fields of Cambodia, or at Perm 36, the only gulag prison that remains intact in what was the Soviet Union.

Mid-trip, Theroux - whose dozens of novels include The Mosquito Coast and the forgotten, Singapore-set gem Saint Jack (both reduced as Hollywood movies) - finds himself on the verge of China. We behold a devoutly curious, absurdly well-traveled, thoroughly sophisticated American in his 60s, who's lived in Africa (as a Peace Corps volunteer), in London (as a contentedly detached outsider) and Hawaii (where he's a professional beekeeper when not pounding the keyboard).

All that, and the sense of wonder his detractors claim he doesn't have comes bursting through on the page, in luminous prose: "In the darkness of early morning in the train's ordinary class, all the windows open, nothing was visible except the blurred outlines of the low buildings. Mandalay, like a city sketched in charcoal, was little more than these soft tracings, and its complex smell, of wood fires and dust, dog hairs and blossoms, crumbled brick and incense, diesel fumes, stagnant water, and the aromas of small fried cakes that the other passengers were wolfing out of fat-soaked wrappings of newspaper."

Elsewhere, Theroux comments on the murderous depravities of Pol Pot and the dawn-to-midnight drunkards - himself included - at large on the Trans-Siberian Express. He finds dangerous primitivism in various "Stans" (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan . . .) and the quiet that has settled over Vietnam three decades after the deflated Americans fled - along with a new spirit of enterprise.

Revisiting Hue, Theroux sidesteps nostalgia, as is his habit: "Along with the snake wine and the powdered antlers for aphrodisiacs and the fragrant bricks of tea was the new Asia of ingenious piracy: knockoff Nikes, fake Tag Heuer watches for $15, Lacoste polo shirts, Zippo lighters and mountains of bootleg CDs . . . But who could blame them?"

As ever, Theroux takes us into the jitney with him, into the jail cell, the ashram and the mostly deserted train station. For all its wit and beauty, there's a darkness and impenetrable solitude about his writing, but he clearly wants us to go with him, no matter who or what he encounters, whatever the inconvenient truth might be. He takes us not to mere places, but to regions in the mind that we likely haven't known before.

Brass tacks: Theroux's real work is not about travel; it's about the progress of the soul.

Bill Gallo is a freelance journalist who lives in Denver.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar

* By Paul Theroux Houghton Mifflin, 496 pages, $28.

* Grade: A

On tedious travel

In a Salon.com interview, Theroux once said travel can be trying. "I mean, I think any sensible person would admit that the experience of travel . . . whether it's plane, train, bus, boat, car - it's awful. It's uncomfortable. It's tedious. It's repetitive. And in order to achieve the epiphanies of travel - the vistas, the experiences - you have to go through an awful lot of hell and high water."

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