Last Train from Zona Verde

 

Paul Theroux is best known for his accounts of train travel, and this book tries to cash in on that interest with a misleading title and dust jacket photo. The only travel he does by train occurs in two chapters, "The Train from Khayelitsha" and "Night Train from Swakopmund," and is described in just a few sentences. Late in the book he passes up the opportunity for another trip by rail. So what's going on?

The journey in this book was conceived as a followup to Dark Star Safari, when he travelled from Cairo to Capetown. This time his intention was to travel up the west side of Africa, heading north from Capetown. The idea had a pleasing symmetry to it and would be the capstone of his long association with Africa, where he spent some of his happiest years. As the trip begins he writes, "I was hurrying away from my routine and my responsibilities and my general disgust with fatuous talk, money talk, money stories, the donkey laughter at dinner parties.... It was travel as rejection, as though in leaving I was saying to those fatuous people, Take that."

At first he is happy to be back in Africa, and from Capetown he heads north by bus into Namibia, where he joins a group of people he was keen to meet, the !Kung who live at the western edge of the Kalahari. He visits the Hoba meteorite, a 60-ton hunk of iron that did not shatter when it impacted, and the Veterinary Fence (aka the Red Line) which stretches across the entire width of northern Namibia to stop the threat of rinderpest. He slips across the border into Botswana to visit a posh tourist resort called Abu, located close to the Okavanga delta. The cost is $4000 a night, and though he is often scornful of tourists and has a hatred of "the taming of wild animals, especially large ones," he finds riding an elephant "a transcendent experience and an unexpected thrill." The owner is a friend of his, and its ultimate purpose is to restore orphaned elephants to the wild. Later one of the trainers was crushed to death by his favourite elephant.

The trip turns bad at the border crossing into into Angola. Although he does not realize it at the time, his credit card is cloned and runs up a bill totalling US $40,000. It's just a foretaste of what's to come, for Angola is a country that was ravaged by civil war from 1975 to 2002. A former Portuguese penal colony, it thrived on the slave trade which later was transformed into "forced labour," a practice that continued into the 1960s. Now "Angolans lived among garbage heaps," and the government was "corrupt, predatory, tyrannical, unjust, and utterly uninterested in its people." In the capital, Luanda, xenophobia was "on an official scale, institutional alien-hating." The streets of the "joyless" city are filled with "thousands of homeless children" and "countless numbers of war amputees." The penultimate chapter is entitled "This is What the World Will Look Like When It Ends."

In the final chapter -- "What Am I Doing Here? -- Theroux, in his 70s and suffering from gout, justifies his decision to discontinue the trip, which had become a "toxic tour through the bowels of West Africa, along the Côte d'Ordure." To travel there needed the "skills and temperament of a proctologist." It was only then that I became aware of the full meaning behind the book's title. "Zona verde" refers the bush, and he turns down an opportunity to travel by train into the bush on the Benguela Railway. The word "ultimate" in the subtitle did not mean, as I had assumed, "the very best," but "the last." I have no doubt that Theroux, often a sly writer, was fully aware of the potential confusion. He's having a little joke at the reader's expense.

This is not to say I did not enjoy the book. As usual, I enjoyed Theroux's great curiosity, his focus on details, his vast reading, his caustic comments. For example, he dismisses Laurens van der Post as "a posturing fantasist and fake mystic" and "an unreliable witness." He says the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy was anachronistic and "made anthropologists apoplectic with rage." He compares the herds of tourists unfavourably with wild animals placidly drinking at a waterhole. "Don't get between a tourist and the buffet," observes a friend.

I'm looking forward to his newest book, Burma Sahib, about another of my favourite writers, George Orwell.

Figures in a Landscape

Essays 2001-2016

Aspects of Paul Theroux's writing that I've always enjoyed are his astute observations, his acerbic jabs, and the vast range of his reading.

A self-confessed graphomaniac, he opens the book with an obscure quote from the bible (Habakkuk) and towards the end mentions a favourite book, Freud's Civilization and its Discontents.

His command of language is impressive without being pedantic. "Overegged" (used twice) is a delightful new word I learned. Its meaning was easy to guess at, or so I thought until trying it out on my wife. She figured it had something to do with a failed recipe.

Writers

Approximately a third of the 30 pieces are about writers -- Henry David Thoreau, Hunter Thompson, Joseph Conrad, E.B. White, Paul Bowles, Somerset Maugham, Harper Lee -- as well as:
 
Oliver Sacks - a brilliant man whose oddities make him resemble some of his patients. Theroux describes a walk around the streets of New York with him and one of his patients, a gifted artist with Tourette syndrome. Theroux observes Sacks observing how the patient interacts with others, including Theroux.

Graham Greene - one of the longest and most interesting entries consists of three articles grouped under the general heading of "Greeneland." One is about Greene himself, while the others focus on two of his books, Journey without Maps and The Comedians.

Muriel Spark - after reading this piece I rushed out and bought one of her novels.

Georges Simenon - predicted that he would win the "Swedish lottery" and was outraged when Camus did. Theroux remarks that there are interesting similarities in their work.

Travel

The core of the travel articles are set in Africa and include "Stanley: The Ultimate African Explorer," and Theroux's observations about Greene's African experiences.

In "The Rock Star's Burden" Theroux blasts aid projects, believing they do more harm than good, and takes specific aim at Bono's involvement, ridiculing "his role as Mrs. Jellyby in a ten-gallon hat, which he frequently talks through." (Dervla Murphy, in an Irish Times review of Figures in a Landscape, agrees with this assessment.) And when Theroux sees Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Sudan, "the image that sprang to my mind was of Tarzan and Jane." These views are dramatized in his novel, The Lower River.

Another accusatory piece is "The Seizures in Zimbabwe," which first appeared as the epilogue to the paperback edition of Dark Star Safari. It refers to farmers being forced off their farms and the country's resulting economic collapse. "Seizure" in this respect has a double meaning.

Autobiographical Musings

The last piece in the book is entitled "The Trouble with Autobiography," in which he writes:

I have no intention of writing an autobiography, and as for allowing others to practice what Kipling called "the higher cannibalism" on me (Henry James called biographers "post-mortem exploiters"), I plan to frustrate them by putting obstacles in their way.

He then gives a brief but interesting survey of autobiographies by major writers, noting their evasions, omissions, and falsifications, but at the end confesses, "The more I reflect on my life, the greater the appeal of the autobiographical novel." The book's final sentence: "Therefore, when my Copperfield beckoned, I wrote Mother Land."

In fact, there are many items of an autobiographical nature in the book, and include pieces on living in England and Hawaii, raising geese, collecting art, travelling in dangerous places, a narrow escape from a sexual predator in New York, and "My Life as a Reader."

The article on England (where Theroux lived for 18 years as an official alien) veers between the hilarious and the horrific (riots, bombings). "I learned to smile the ambiguous alien smile when English people said, 'America's so violent.'

One of the longest articles in the book concerns his father who, though born in Massachusetts, spoke French with a Quebecois accent (much like Kerouac, I assume). Theroux incorporated aspects of him in Allie Fox, the protagonist of The Mosquito Coast.

This book is Theroux's third collection of essays. The dust jacket photo from his first collection, Sunrise with Sea Monsters: Travels and Discoveries 1964-1984, is below left. The one from this book is below right.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

On the Tracks of the 
Great Railway Bazaar

“Writing about travel,” says Theroux, is “the nearest I will come to autobiography.” This book seems more personal than others because it reprises the 1973 journey that first brought him fame, The Great Railway Bazaar.

Back then he didn't mention the “domestic turmoil” the trip had caused, but in 2004 he “relived much of the pain.” Railway Bazaar, he tells us now, was written “in an agony of suffering.”

Other personal details include a gouty knee, double cataract surgery, his mother's verdict on his first book (“trash”). He reports the criticism of his former students in Singapore “who said, in so many words, what a horse's ass I had been,” and “rubbished” him “for having been a poor teacher.”

He provides updates on two of the more memorable characters from Bazaar. Molesworth, who later complained that Theroux had not used his real name, and Mr. Bernard, who read about himself with much pleasure and whose hotel profited from being mentioned in the book. Theroux is fondly remembered by Mr. Bernard's son: “We talk about you all the time. We have a copy of your book. You were up there in room eleven.” Theroux adds:

Nothing like this had ever happened to me among my own family.  Was this a motivation, the embrace of strangers, in my becoming a traveller? ... Without daring to anticipate such an event, it was the sort of reunion I had hoped for when I set out to repeat my trip.

Fame

Author photos from the two books

In 1973 Theroux was a minor novelist. In 2004 he's an established author who's asked to give talks in Istanbul, Ankara, Ashbagat, and Singapore.

His works are everywhere: Russian translations in Moscow bookstores, bootleg copies in Phnom Penh, and a guidebook that dismisses his views as “caustic.”

On the train he notices a fellow traveller reading Mosquito Coast, and in India chats with Prince Charles about the premiere of the movie based on it. His Singapore novel, Saint Jack, and the movie based on it, are finally available there.

Literature

One of the great pleasures of Theroux's travel books is how literary-minded they are. He always serves up a wide variety of quotes and references. A nice example: Thoreau's mention of ice from Walden pond ending up in India.

He hobnobs with other writers: Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shaka in Turkey, Haruki Murakami and Pico Iyer in Japan. Their conversations are delightful, their literary gossip fascinating especially when the subject is other travel writers. Jan Morris is esteemed, Chatwin “a boaster,” and Hunter Thompson “one of the most timid travellers I've ever known.”

In Sri Lanka he visits Arthur Clarke, “so frail, so vague, his mind drifting,” his appearance “like the sort of alien he had described in his prose fantasies.” He also visits the bungalow where Leonard Woolf lived, and glimpses the small island where Paul Bowles wrote his Tangier novel, The Spider's House.

War

American foreign policy dictates some route changes. In 1973 he visited Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, but in 2004 he swings around them via Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. 

In 1973 the Vietnam war was still raging, which prevented him from reaching northern Vietnam and Cambodia. Now he is able to visit Hanoi and Angkor Wat, and talks to former soldiers from both sides. Two Viet Cong vets, now construction workers, share a joint with him.

He quotes an alarming statistic from British historian J.M. Roberts: “a heavier tonnage of bombs dropped on North Vietnam than on Germany and Japan together in the entire Second World War.” In Japan, Murakami supplies this alarming fact: “the firebombing of Tokyo...killed more people than the atom bombs.”

Food

Stuffed grape leaves in Turkey and “an eggplant dish so delicious its name is a catchphrase, imam bayildi, 'the imam fainted'”

Spinach pies in Turkmenistan and pigeon eggs in Uzbekistan

“...amok, one of Cambodia's delicious national dishes, the snakehead [fish] simmered in coconut milk with spices”

Vietnamese eel soup (recipe included) and “snake wine (each bottle with a coiled cobra pickled inside)”

“Woodka” and “pissing dumplings” and bags of smoked omul in Russia

Architecture

Thanks to the Internet and Google Earth, there has never been a better time to be an armchair traveller. I was particularly keen to check out the following places:

Chatrapathi Sivaji Terminus in Mumbai
“one of the grandest railway stations in the world”
 
Kuala Lumpur Railway Station
“a marvel of good design...any American city would have been proud to have such a station”

Palace of Congresses in Bucharest
“an impressively ugly and gigantic example of megalomaniacal architecture”

Shimoly Station in Tashkent
“one of the largest railway stations I saw on my entire trip, possibly the grandest, lovely even”

Todai-ji Temple in Japan
“this 18th century structure was the single most imposing building I saw in the whole of Japan”

Vladivostok Railway Station
“a weirdly pretentious example of Russian railway design”

Cities & Countries

Ashbagat 
“a city without benches, the subtle message being: keep walking”

Cambodia 
"I was not prepared for people so poor to look so beautiful...even as beggars they had dignity”

Georgia 
a “wolfish landscape”

India
“...the paradox, that India's poor were her wealth”

Istanbul 
“one of the most...hospitable cities in the world”

Myanmar 
“...perhaps the only country I passed through where I met nothing but generosity and kindness. And the Burmese were the most ill-treated, worst governed, belittled, and persecuted of any people I met...”

Saigon 
“one big bazaar of ruthless capitalism”

Singapore
“good manners are suspect” and blaming "a national vice”

Tokyo 
“more machine than city”

Turkmenistan 
“an emptiness of lizards and a landscape like cat litter“

Vietnam 
“travel in Vietnam for an American was a lesson in humility”

Vladivostok 
“one of the Siberian centers of skinhead gang activity”

Caveat

 “Travellers are always inventing the country they're travelling through.”

Maps

The Lower River

"All news out of Africa is bad," Paul Theroux says at the beginning of Dark Star Safari (2003), and in Malawi he takes the news personally.

He taught school there as a young man with the Peace Corps, and now 35 years later he finds a betrayal of that hopeful time. Things have only gotten worse.

The country is poorer, the people more venal, his old school a shambles. He decides that international aid is the chief culprit, and discards a cherished desire to "spend a week or so teaching, helping out, doing something useful." He vows never to send another book to Malawi and concludes that "only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa."

That visit fuelled a recent novel, The Lower River (2012), whose protagonist, like Theroux, grew up in Medford and taught in the Lower River district of Malawi.

For Ellis Hock, those were "the happiest years of his life." He "craved that simple, older world he’d known as a young teacher, which was also a place in which hope still existed, because it was a work in progress." And so at the age of 62 Hock returns to Malawi hoping to recapture those magical years which still "cast a green glow in his memory."

Instead the trip goes from bad to worse with terrifying inevitability. The tension does not let up until the final page, and fulfills the promise of Theroux's picture on the dustjacket. He never smiles in these photos, but in this one he looks positively menacing. His glare is a challenge delivered from a blurry tropical river, as though warning the reader he means to exact full revenge for the mess the world has made of Africa.

Fiction vs Non-Fiction

I usually prefer Theroux's travel books to his novels, but the way in which Dark Star and Lower River overlap gave the novel an added dimension that I really enjoyed. For example, Theroux travels by dugout canoe down the Shire and Zambesi Rivers and into Mozambique, during which he hears vague mention of "bad people" on the river. When Hock makes the same journey, these "bad people" are brought to life in the novel's most chilling episode.

In Dark Star Theroux writes, "I seldom saw relief workers who did not in some way remind me of people herding animals and throwing food to them, much as rangers did to the animals in stricken game parks." In Lower River he dramatizes this observation.

In Dark Star Theroux notices a "small ugly man" with a "hideous face, bumpy with boils and growths and seeping wounds, and withered fingers." He was like "the Fool in a Shakespeare play, the court jester who is licenced to do or say anything he likes." He is the model for a Lower River dwarf named Snowdon, who plays a key role at the novel's climax.

Some reviewers have found echoes of Heart of Darkness (and Handful of Dust) in Lower River. Any such resemblances strike me as rather superficial, though they did remind me of that dustjacket photo, and the observation of an old friend in Dark Star, who is surprised by Theroux's griping: "He suspected that I had turned into Mister Kurtz."

Medford and Malabo

Malabo is the name of the village that Hock travels to, but before he gets there Theroux sets up several sly scenes that foreshadow Africa.

Hock meets a flaky New Ager who attends a Witch Camp and takes part in a Mud Ritual. She also owns a python that's been acting strangely. Hock's warning is similar to the one he himself receives in Malabo: "They will eat your money and then they will eat you."

Hock and his wife have several sessions with a marriage counselor named Doctor Bob, whose effectiveness is on a par with that of a snake doctor in Malabo.

In a delicious irony, Hock throws his cellphone into the Mystic River flowing though Medford.

A Nest of Snakes

The most obvious culprits in Lower River are a relief organization patronized by celebrities, and a former employee, now a village headman, who mulcts Hock of his last cent through artful fawning and appeals to tribal custom.

But Hock is also complicit, for he considers himself an expert on Malawi despite his decades-long absence. In fact, his delusions extend back to his first visit when, motivated by local superstition, he gets the loopy idea of catching snakes as a way of impressing villagers. It earns him the dubious name of Snake Man.

In America his knowledge seems impressive, but in Africa it becomes suspect. He refers to puff adders as "not especially venomous," when in fact they are responsible for more deaths in Africa than any other snake. And the casual way in which other deadly snakes are handled, or referred to -- mambas, boomslangs, the innocent-sounding twig snake -- exposes him as a chump.

His interest in snakes scuttles a couple of cherished dreams -- as a teacher, attaining an African woman he has fallen in love with ("Snakes are afraid of me," he tells her); and on his return, restoring his old school, which has fallen into ruin and become a "nest of snakes." Finding a black mamba there...

...he prodded it, let it whip and coil, and pressed its head with the end of the stick, quickly snatched, keeping its frothy mouth just above his fist. Then he brought it outside to show the boys, a trophy they'd remember.

The boys, who were sent by the headman to help clean up the school, flee with good reason, for the black mamba is one of the fastest and most lethal snakes in Africa.

It should be no surprise that Hock's hobby is viewed with suspicion by the villagers. A snake doctor is sent for and a snake dance performed. When the headman shows Hock the protective scars around his wrist, he says, "You see, we are not fearing you."

Perhaps even more interesting are the hands of the 16-year-old girl who risks her life for Hock. They are "scaly, slick...almost reptilian."

Further Reading

It is worth remembering that Theroux is a crafty and provocative writer who enjoys confounding readers with, as he puts it in Hotel Honolulu, "autobiographical fantasies."

Chapters 14-16 are the relevant ones in Dark Star.

An early excerpt from Lower River appeared in The New Yorker in 2009. In it Theroux's alter ego is named Altman.

Hotel Honolulu

The narrator in Hotel Honolulu is a writer "with a hard-to-pronounce name." He grew up in Medford to become a "grumpy traveler in a book that had been a bestseller in the 1970s." He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. He arrived in Hawaii at age 49 having left "a house and a wife and a whole life in London."

Now he is the manager of a hotel, which becomes for him "a house of fiction," a collection of tales about himself, the owner, the staff, and the guests. Many of these stories are lurid – lots of sex and corpses. Some are told in a single chapter, others are more expansive. Unifying them are the evolving and somewhat parallel stories of the owner (he marries a whore) and the narrator (he marries a whore's daughter).

The owner is Buddy Hamstra, nicknamed Tuna, a wealthy foul-mouthed joker who won the hotel in a poker game. One of his favourite pranks is putting dogshit in hair dryers. He says to his latest wife, "I wouldn’t piss up your ass if your guts were on fire." Theroux tempers such crudeness (and there is plenty) with numerous literary references, in particular to Tolstoy ("Tolstoys 'R Us"), Henry James (he "would love Hawaii"), and Stephen King ("a modest talent").

In the end the narrator becomes a beekeeper. It's not too different from being a hotel manager: the staff do all the work.

Miscellaneous Notes

The hotel has 80 rooms, the book 80 chapters. The name of the hotel's bar is Paradise Lost. One of the hotel's signature dishes is Serious Flu Symptoms Chili.

Referring to some of the characters in the novel, the narrator says: "If they had read anything I had written, they would never tell me stories." Some of their names: Clamback, Fishlow, Godbolt, Lionberg, Malanut, Figland, and Kamakawiwo'ole, a 650-lb Hawaiian singer who needs a forklift to get around.

The narrator provides a blurb for a novel by Ruth Jhabvala, upon a request from Jackie Onassis (who, after the death of her second husband, worked as an editor for Viking and Doubleday). Does she represent a royal figure in this beehive of a novel? The Kennedy lineage figures elsewhere in the book.

Leon Edel is a Henry James scholar who grew up in Saskatchewan, attended McGill, and was living in Hawaii at the time of his death in 1997. Theroux makes him a character in the novel. Edel, says the narrator, is "the only person in Hawaii who knew me – and in the most profound and subtle way, through my books, the detailed autobiographical fantasies of my fiction."

Whereas Theroux's travel books are sometimes referred to as "travel novels," Honolulu Hotel, a work of fiction, is semi-autobiographical. Thus, much of his work is about himself. But then what writer's isn't? Theroux does so more provocatively than most.

Theroux is a beekeeper. The brand of honey he produces is called Oceania Ranch Pure Hawaiian Honey.

Excerpt

"Man, he got one big book, howlie bugga." "I never wen see no book." "In he office." "Bugga office?" "Yah. Howlie bugga office. Big book. Hybolical book." "Eh, no easy fo read, yah." "Too much easy for howlie." "Yah." "Yah. Bymbye, da howlie bugga be rascal." "Frikken big rascal."

The book is Anna Karenina. The "howlie bugga" is the narrator. Like Paul Theroux, he is a "frikken big rascal."

Honolulu Star-Bulletin Interview

Riding the Iron Rooster

By Train Through China

Paul Theroux loves trains. His first great success was The Great Railway Bazaar, which described a journey by train from London to Japan, returning via the Trans-Siberian railway. Riding the Iron Rooster takes place in the mid-1980s, more than 10 years later, and describes a year spent in China travelling by train.

The book begins with a charming epigraph: "A peasant must stand a long time on a hillside with his mouth open before a roast duck flies in." But the charm is superficial. China is an ancient, hungry, overpopulated country. In some places people are still living in caves. Theroux explains:

The Chinese had moved mountains, diverted rivers, wiped out the animals, eliminated the wilderness; they had subdued nature and had it screaming for mercy. If there were enough of you it was really very easy to dig up a whole continent and plant cabbages. They had built a wall that was the only man-made object on earth that could be seen from the moon. Whole provinces had been turned into vegetable gardens, and a hill wasn't a hill--it was a way of growing rice vertically.

Theroux, able to converse in Chinese, crisscrosses the country by rail and examines everything with a microscopic eye. He reports on the Chinese penchant for spitting, the use of cormorants for fishing, an erotic novel that has been banned for five centuries. "The Chinese laugh," he tells us, "is seldom a response to something funny." A sign in a train reads: "Guests must not perform urination in sink basin." The death penalty consists of "a bullet in the back of the neck."

The food is an adventure in itself: sheep vein, snake soup, yak slices, cow tendon, caterpillar fungus, chicken foot stew, rotten eggs wrapped in seaweed, grilled bear's paw, stewed moose nose, stir-fried camel's foot, monkey-leg mushrooms, pig's trotters in gelatin.

He is particularly interested in Mao's legacy. What he discovers is that the Great Helmsman is in a kind of disgrace. The museum in his home town is closed. The Cultural Revolution is widely admitted to have been a mistake.

The book concludes on a positive note with a visit to Tibet. "Lhasa was the one place in China I eagerly entered, and enjoyed being in, and was reluctant to leave." Part of this is due Tibet being "a place for which China had no solution."

Theroux is an impeccable writer -- 480 pages and not a word out of place -- and he always has something interesting to say: a pithy observation, a telling description, an historical aside.

It should be added, however, that the book is more than 20 years old, and its portrait of China may be seriously out-of-date. It is also worth noting another Chinese proverb (one that Theroux himself is fond of quoting):

"We can always fool a foreigner."