Paul Theroux: Back on the Tracks

You have to hand it to travel writers who take on huge subjects. And traversing Europe, Russia, central Asia, India, southeast Asia and Japan by various modes of transport (mostly rail), then writing a 500-page book about the journey — with detail piled upon observational detail — is pretty huge. It takes guts, and some might say a bit of hubris, even to try.

That's true even if you're Paul Theroux, arguably the dean of all living travel writers and certainly one of the most accomplished. In his latest, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Theroux retraces the steps he took in his first notable travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar, published more than 30 years ago. Ghost Train's conceit is Theroux exploring not only how the places he visited back then have changed, but how he has as well. "The decision to return to any early scene in your life is dangerous but irresistible, not as a search for lost time but for the grotesquerie of what happened since."

"Grotesquerie" is an odd word to use here, because it's in conflict with much of the reportage that follows. Consider some of the places Theroux visits, and people he meets. In Bangalore, India, he comes across two guys, Vidiadhar and Vincent, who had managed one of the earliest call centers, among other things processing mortgages for an Australian finance company. Theroux sets up this section by noting that "in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Indian labour had been exploited for its cheapness. Coolie labour was the basis of the British Raj ... Again I recognized the paradox, that India's poor were its wealth.''

But it transpires that Vidiadhar and Vincent eventually quit the call center and go to work for another company (or maybe found one, Theroux doesn't quite say) that makes low-cost shirts for big American brands like Kenneth Cole and Tommy Hilfiger. These guys are "exploited?'' They don't seem to be. Considering Ghost Train is supposed to hark back to the journey Theroux took three decades ago, we might get a better sense of whether or not Vidiadhar and Vincent are exploited if we knew what their parents' lives were like. But Theroux doesn't bother to find out.

Sure, there are some true grotesqueries to be found in the book. There's a wittily observed chapter on the weirdness that is Turkmenistan, with statues and giant photographs of the late dictator Saparmurat Niyazov everywhere: "In some he looked like a fat and grinning Dean Martin wearing a Super Bowl ring." As someone who's been to most of the places Theroux describes, that's the kind of sentence I want to read; the kind that makes me think, "Exactly!" (and "I wish I'd written that.")

But there aren't enough of those moments. Instead, we get plenty of cringe-inducing inner ruminations (such as Theroux's particularly creepy thoughts on the inherent eroticism of the uniforms that female train-ticket attendants wear in Japan), and breathtaking generality — the best example of which is the bizarre rant at the very end. On the last page, Theroux writes this: "Most of the world is worsening, shrinking to a ball of bungled desolation. Only the old can really see how gracelessly the world is ageing and all that we have lost."

First, there's not a lot in the preceding pages to support Theroux's proclamation that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket. And second, anyone who thinks that about most of the places covered in Ghost Train is clearly not paying attention. The Cambodians, the Vietnamese, the Russians, the Indians — their world is "worsening?" Compared to 30 years ago? If Theroux actually believes that, it tells us more about the author, 30 years on, than the places he has visited.