The trodden track

Travel becomes the saddest of pleasures for Theroux as he relives the great train journey.


Ghost Train To The Eastern Star: On The Tracks Of The Great Railway Bazaar
by Paul Theroux
Hamish Hamilton
Price: Rs 550, Pages: 496

More than 30 years ago, an American writer travelled by train from London to Tokyo, via India, and back again. His book about that journey, The Great Railway Bazaar, was a huge success, and heralded a new genre of travel writing in which the journey and the human encounters it involved were more important than history and monuments.

Paul Theroux went on to write many more travel books and novels, including a remarkable portrait of his former friend V.S. Naipaul.

Theroux's new book is a strangely muted affair. He decides to repeat the journey of The Great Railway Bazaar, with a few route changes-and several extra plane journeys. He is twice as old as he was on his original trip, and a lot grumpier.

And although Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is perfectly readable, he seems to have lost some of the spark and curiosity that marked his earlier work. He also appears to be in a hurry to get home.

He reveals that the jolly tone of The Great Railway Bazaar concealed an inner misery. In his absence, his wife had "taken a lover"—and he had realised this while talking to her from faraway Tokyo—one of only two conversations there were able to have during his entire trip.

This time he has a BlackBerry. So he can be in constant touch with his second wife, nicknamed Penelope, after the faithful wife of Odysseus. Penelope, he tells us, is at home-knitting.

A crowded market in AmritsarA crowded market in Amritsar
Theroux, meanwhile, is visiting brothels and chatting-no more than that, of course-with prostitutes. He writes at a greater length about his visit to a Bangkok masseuse called Sky than he does about his entire journey through China.

He spends a lot of time testing his theory that "a country's pornography offers the quickest insight into the culture and inner life of a nation". Bestiality, he tells us, is big in Hungary, while the Japanese are obsessed with schoolgirls.

There are some high-brow moments too. His guides in Istanbul and Tokyo are novelists Orhan Pamuk and Haruki Murakami. He bumps into Charles and Camilla in Jodhpur, and nearly plays ping pong with Arthur C. Clarke in Colombo.

He gets excited when he finds someone reading The Great Railway Bazaar on a train. But most of the times, he seems bored, and the best passages of the new book are when he visits places that have changed beyond recognition such as Singapore; or those he didn't visit in the old one.

Iran, perhaps rather wisely, refused Theroux a visa, and he is forced to travel through central Asia. His cruelly funny portrait of everyday life under the last days of the unlamented former dictator of Turkmenistan, Saparmyrat Niyazov, stands out as the best bit of travel writing in the entire book.

He devotes about a fifth of the book to India, which he doesn't really pretend to like. That he also isn't very interested is clear from the start. He flies from Tashkent to Amritsar on a flight on which all the passengers- male and female-are Sikhs, and then tells us that every one of the Sikh women was wearing a sari.

Paul TherouxPaul Theroux
A sari? He then reads zindabad written on an Amritsar wall, and tells us confidently that the word means "a strike". He is not impressed by the few changes he sees.

In Amritsar, "Joginder's greasy cafe and pastry shop was now Joginder's greasy Internet cafe and pastry shop and looked 200 years old." And then out come the pastiches of Indian English ("Mungo jews", which means mango juice) and the generalisations.

He refers to the "craving" of Indians to have the world's good opinion of them, and "their moralising and disquisitional nature, their unembarrassed pleasure of speechifying, their love of the rotund and the sententious, and the enduring quaintness of their customs".

He does not like the dirt, or the "crowds of the cringing and the limbless", and describes life in India as "a monotony of frotteurisman unending experience of nonconsensual rubbing".

Theroux is conscious of how age has made him more curmudgeonly as well as less visible and maybe less interesting to his fellow train passengers. Perhaps, this helps explain why so many of his conversations are rather dull than those in The Great Railway Bazaar, and why he sees little hope for the future.

He returns even gloomier and more rotund than when he left- telling his deflated readers that "travel is the saddest of pleasures." His pessimism has become all-pervasive: "The world is deteriorating and shrinking to a ball of bungled desolation". He must have been pleased to see Penelope.

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