Water Way

In 1970, 20-year-old Edward A. Gargan of Boston went to jail for two years because he refused to fight in Vietnam: he felt America's war there was unjust. Thus began a lifelong attachment to a continent which, at that time, he had not even seen. Gargan would go on to spend 15 years traversing Asia as a New York Times correspondent, covering stories from India to China. He says he wrote his meandering travelogue The River's Tale: A Year on the Mekong (Knopf; 322 pages) for two reasons: to fill in some of the blanks from a career of writing in column inches, not manuscript pages, and to "lend some substance and meaning" to those two years in a Kentucky prison.

It's an epic voyage, drifting down all 4,880 km of Southeast Asia's longest river. Gargan begins at the Mekong's source in the thin air of the Tibetan plateau and goes with the flow until it reaches the South China Sea. En route through China, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam—all countries nursing scars from a tumultuous and bloody century—he introduces us to a mElange of characters: yak herders, opium farmers, European backpackers, jaded aid workers, Vietnam vets—and endangered Irrawaddy dolphins. Some of those he meets seem unaffected by the horrors of the region's recent past, others plainly have wounded souls.

Unfortunately, the newspaper man's slavish attention to detail—facts, dates and potted biographies—leaves Gargan little room for introspection and self-analysis. He takes up too much space running down the political histories of the countries along the Mekong, and identifying all the principal players. His diligence makes the reading interesting and informative, but hardly gripping. Every now and again, you wish he'd pause from the narration of facts to tell us more about himself, about how his perspective on Asia has changed with the years—molded by the things he's seen, the stories he's covered. This is particularly true for the section on Vietnam: you want to know how he feels now about the country for which he gave up two years of his youth. Maddeningly, Gargan keeps that to himself.

It is in Cambodia that Gargan's journalistic talents shine. Uncovering the blank spots in the memory of a decimated culture where mothers no longer know how to properly feed their babies, he listens to tales of prisoners who subsisted on five grains of rice a day in Pol Pot's work camps and insightfully wonders how much of the story is being left out—what horrible deeds were committed to avoid being dragged away and bludgeoned to death. Here, unlike in Vietnam, he engages the central question of how survivors continue their lives with such a grisly past literally seeping out of the ground beneath them. The sad answer: they look the other way.

In the end, though, while The River's Tale sails along at a brisk pace, with carefully laid historical context and compelling anecdotes, it lacks real sparkle. And, for all the interesting characters Gargan introduces us to, we never really get to know the person we most want to meet: the author himself.