Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
A Review of Paul Theroux’s Latest Travel Book
In 2006 Paul Theroux travelled through 25 countries and took almost double that number of long journeys by train, bus and boat. From London he passed through Europe to Turkey, through Georgia and “the Stans” to India, on to Sri Lanka and through the countries of southeast Asia to China, briefly, then to Japan and back through Russia on the Trans Siberian railway.
A Travel Writing Landmark
The journey crosses much of the ground that he covered in the 1970s when he was still unknown and struggling, and the world was very different. His book from that trip, The Great Railway Bazaar, became a landmark in travel writing. His new work, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, is full of comparisons with how things were in 1973 and how people and places have changed.
By choice he would have travelled everywhere by train, “probably the best way of getting a glimpse of how people actually live – the back gardens, the barns, the hovels, the side roads and slums, the telling facts of village life, the misery that aeroplanes fly over.” But the trains do not run everywhere, and he had to bypass a few places that are still too dangerous for travellers.
Living Among Strangers
The trains he chooses are not the luxurious hotels-on-wheels designed for the wealthy. “Luxury is the enemy of observation,” he tells us, and “Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel … Travel means living among strangers, their characteristic stinks and perfumes, eating their food, listening to their dramas, enduring their opinions.” This comes early in the book so readers know what they are in for.
He dislikes most big cities, especially haphazardly developed ones like Chennai in southern India where the traffic is so awful that, just a hundred yards from his hotel, he has to abandon ideas of walking anywhere. But nearby Tiruchirappalli “was everything I had hoped for”: small, dusty, mostly rickshaws, a vast rock fort with a temple on top, and an ancient, partially painted temple complex.
Voices of the Unseen
The book is as much about people as places. Most of Theroux’s conversations are with ordinary folk who most tourists will hardly notice. He is like a globe-trotting Studs Terkel, recording the voices of the usually unseen and unheard. There are tricycle and taxi drivers, factory workers, people in charity centres, students, fellow travellers in crowded railway carriages, low ranking soldiers and not a few prostitutes, some proud of their modest lives, some ashamed, one brought to tears by his mild but insightful questions, many hoping for a better life somewhere else.
Novels and histories that Theroux reads along the way add depth to the book, as do extended conversations with a handful of internationally known writers. He meets the 2006 Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, the 89-year-old Arthur C Clarke in Colombo and Haruki Murakami in Tokyo, all of whom help to inform and flesh out his observations.
Burmese Days
A strong narrative makes the book easy to read, and hard to put down, for the journey as a whole but also for its revealing sub plots. There is the “hairy troglodytic woman shrieking abuse into her mobile phone” on the train to Jodhpur in India. She arrogantly dismisses Theroux, but a few days and pages later finds him at her posh hotel chatting amiably with Prince Charles. A tricycle driver helps our author around Mandalay in Burma and shares his dignified but oppressed and sad life story. On returning from a side trip Theroux seeks him out and helps him buy a motorcycle that will probably change his life.
The text is full of pithy descriptions of people and places. Budapest is “a city of grim-faced women in old clothes, scuffing through the slush in dirty boots.” He admires Istanbul, “a city with the soul of a village,” though when a chef on the train that took him there “ blew his nose messily he looked as if he were using a rag that had just wiped a dipstick.” Georgia is “a supine and beleaguered country,” Turkmenistan, “a tyranny run by a madman”.
The lack of an index is the book’s only weakness. This is another memorable work from one of the most perceptive and articulate of travel writers, a great read for anyone who wants a candid, unromantic view of life among a large slice of the world’s population, and how it is changing, early in the twenty-first century.
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, by Paul Theroux, Hamish Hamilton, 2008, 485 pages, ISBN 978-0-241-14253-0
One of the unheard at Humayan's Tomb, Delhi
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