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

Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Cola

A Manual of Etiquette for Ladies Crossing Canada by Train

An American woman boards a train in Vancouver for a mock-noir excursion into metafiction. She's wearing a pillbox hat with a veil, and is on the lam for paperhanging in Seattle. "Call her, Our Heroine."

Hot on her heels (and other parts of her anatomy) is a skip-tracer masquerading as a railroad dick. He wears a fedora and boards the train at China Bar, an unscheduled stop in the Fraser Canyon. "Why has the train stopped for this man? For the plot, of course."

He walks into the club car, "and there she is: Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Cola, like a book title. Is this a detective novel or what?"

They occupy adjacent compartments like "two different frames of a love comic," and travel across Canada in chapters as brief as this one:

His address is, at this point, nothing but train. On a stretch of bad track his entire past falls out of the overhead rack and spills on the floor like underwear or playing cards. "Drop something in there sir?" says the porter, who was passing by out in the aisle. "Yes but it's alright," says the Man from China Bar. Lying on the carpet is his identification, the real one, and his purposes, which are large and high-calibre. He shoves it all back into the suitcase. He looks at his shoelaces, which cross each other like two single-minded arguments, and wonders how he got here, wearing feet like this.

The novel's point of view jumps around, and at times Our Heroine addresses the reader directly. ("Remember that.") The writing is playfully existential, and as imaginative as one would expect from a winner of the G-G for poetry.

American money is long and narrow like Virginia Woolf’s feet. The train is going through evening like a detective through someone’s drawers. Her hair falls down her back like a lot of wilderness resisting agriculture. The train is pulling him forward like a zipper...

Author Paulette Jiles called the book a "mini-novel." It came out in 1986, weighs in at 105 pages, and ends - like a famous noirish film - at an airport.

Could Iqaluit be the Canadian equivalent of Casablanca?

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."