The Great Railway Bazaar

I grew up with a wanderlust. A young boy. A voracious reader even then who hailed from a small mining village in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Trains were a joy and an adventure from my youngest days clipping across country to the seedy joys of an often overcast Blackpool or Lytham in July, with a bag of sweets in one hand and a Famous Five or Doctor Who book in the other. My Grandma and brother either side. I have Asia in my soul after thirty years imbibing its tastes and smells and sights and sounds.

Theroux's book - by train from London across Asia - is an obvious delight for me. His observations, encounters and opinions funny, descriptively vivid and oftentimes profound.

I read this many moons ago and I don't remember enjoying it show more quite nearly as much as this time.

Also one of my favourite ever book covers. show less

A distasteful travelling companion, who can nevertheless turn a lovely phrase.
Some brilliant observations of characters and landscapes, especially in India and Vietnam. However, the author’s personality as he depicts himself, although allowing him to enter into situations where I would never go myself, appears to lack sufficient empathy with all those he meets. And although it is a four month train journey, he is only fleetingly present in any one country, which although initially exhilarating, I found dissatisfying by the end of the book. And by the end of the book Theroux had also sickened of the romance of travel, leaving a sour taste - too much drunken wretchedness at his own privileged position.

So, I am left glad to have read the show more book, but not wishing to join Theroux on another journey soon.

As the days passed I slowed down and, with Nagel’s Turkey in my hand, began sightseeing, an activity that delights the truly idle because it seems so much like scholarship, gawping and eavesdropping on antiquity, flattering oneself with the notion that one is discovering the past when really one is inventing it, using a guidebook as a series of swift notations. p36

A workman came, dressed like a grizzly bear. He set up a ladder with the meaningless mechanical care of an actor in an experimental play whose purpose is to baffle a bored audience. p319

The Folio Society edition is another beautiful book, a satisfying size, font and well illustrated (not the author’s photos, but roughly contemporaneous), with a useful map at the endpapers. show less

“Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.”

These are the first words of this marvelous travel book. In 1975, just after the fall of Saigon, Theroux decides to board a train in London and take it to Japan, by a southerly route and come back west, via the Trans-Siberian. He not only rides on some fascinating trains, like the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local and the Mandalay Express, he stops over in many incredible, and sometimes horrifying locales. We pass through Turkey, India, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Tokyo and the former Soviet Union, to name just a few.
This is not a light glossy travelogue, Theroux takes us to some pretty dark places. show more There are under-age brothels, drug-dealers, pimps, shady soldiers and sex clubs. His wry observations are spot-on and he never shies away from discussing all the discomforts that come along with this type of travel.
His writing style is lean and fast and even after 35 years, the narrative still remains modern and fresh. I have not read this author in many years and that’s a shame. show less

This book covers a journey which takes the author by train from London to Japan, returning via the Trans-Siberian, all on the railway, bar a few necessary flights, buses and ships. As with other Theroux travelogues, it is his fellow passengers and the trains that come under the most scrutiny. On the one hand, these passengers offer an insight into their own culture, but sometimes personality clashes or a lack of a common language causes frustration on all sides.

Of his travelling companions, I particularly enjoyed reading about Mr. Bernard in Burma, his views and recollections of the Royal Artillery he worked for. In a kind of travel snobbery, much of Theroux's disdain is reserved for other foreigners, especially his compatriots. I did, show more however, smirk at his interchange with an American Buddhist monk looking for water, but instead finding the author intent on reminding him of his US roots.

What is strange, and rather sad, is that 35 years have passed since his journey and the world is a very different place. Vietnam is no longer at war, indeed it has been open to tourists for many years now. Other countries are all but closed off to travellers now, like Iran and Burma. The legacy of war and Empire is also visible, such as the shot-up carriages in Vietnam, the Victorian houses in Simla, the prevalence of English and British ways in the Subcontinent. It can also be seen in the people, the Eurasians he meets, such as Tony who works for the railway in Burma, or the unwanted children of G.I.s in Vietnam which women try to thrust upon the author, or the British Indian in Pakistan, caught between two cultures, feeling out of place in the U.K., where he was born and brought up, yet equally not quite a local in his adopted country.

The topic of sex is prevalent, as to be expected, the lack f it, the selling of it, tales of exotic sex acts, as well as different attitudes towards it. The candid conversations with the Japanese professor near the end were, for want of a better word, enlightening.

Like Theroux, I love travelling by train, indeed I read the book and am writing this review on a train. This means his travel books appeal to me, from the descriptions of the run-down Orient Express, the faded grandeur of the '20s train to Simla right through to Japan's bullet trains are like manna from heaven. I am reminded of my own trips, of my own experiences of dodgy carriage mates, making the book that much more identifiable with, and thus, more entertaining. I have mixed feelings on reading Theroux, whilst he can be terribly entertaining, he is rather a miserable git.

If you enjoy travelling by train, meeting random people, conversations on everything and nothing, this is the book for you. If you are looking for a travelogue with a view to visiting these places, this isn't for you. show less

Reading Theroux's travel literature, one wonders why he left home - the people he meets are almost universally irritating for him, and he takes little interest in much else except perhaps his own physical discomforts and prejudices. Of course we love to hate this type of splenetic and cantankerousness writing, not unlike Tobias Smollett's 1786 Travels Through France and Italy (Smollett also took a 'Grand Tour'). Theroux models himself an anti-tourist, resisting seeing the sites but when forced he rarely has anything positive to say. This appeals to the reader who wants to travel without being a tourist, but in the end comes across as crass and of little value. He is at his best describing the lowest encounters, prostitutes seem to fill show more the most interesting stories (it's unclear if he partakes but he does imbibe in smoking a fair amount of hashish). Theroux followed the "hippie trail" for part of the way but found them, like most everyone, open to ridicule.

There are some interesting historical curiosities. He traveled through Vietnam in late 1973 when the US military was pulling out, and so he got to see first-hand the deserted bases overtaken by squatters, stripped of every valuable not unlike what happened to Iraq in the wake of the US invasion in 2003, and perhaps not unlike what might happen again in the near future. He also makes a literary connection between the Vietnam War and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, well before the appearance of Apocalypse Now (1979). The best scene in the book I think is with the 3 Americans living on the beach with some Vietnamese women.

In the end this is an important book in the travel literature canon because Theroux set out to create something new and found a wide following of readers helping to revive interest in the genre, but he was eclipsed by writers like Bruce Chatwin (In Patagonia) who really did move the state of the art out of the 19th century into a modern aesthetic.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd show less

I’m told this is a benchmark in travel literature, a must read, but I couldn’t honestly rate this even three stars. It’s the kind of book that instead of causing you to yearn to see new places makes you want to stay at home. The book would seem to have all the ingredients of a classic; in print after 38 years, this is the account of Theroux’s travels by rail across Asia in the mid seventies, beginning with the Orient Express. Each chapter is named after a train taken: The Orient Express Direct, The Mandalay Express, Golden Arrow to Kuala, Trans-Siberian Express, etc. Theroux can write beautifully, lyrically. Look, for instance, at the opening of the book:

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of Boston and Maine, I show more have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink. The train can reassure you in awful places--a far cry from the anxious sweats of doom airplanes inspire, or the nauseating gas-sickness of the long-distance bus, or the paralysis that afflicts the car passenger. If a train is large and comfortable you don’t even need a destination; a corner seat is enough, and you can be one of those travelers who stay in motion, straddling the tracks, and never arrive or feel they out to--like that lucky man who lives on Italian Railways because he is retired and has a free pass. Better to go first class than to arrive, or, as the English novelist Michael Frayn once rephrased McLuhan: “The journey is the goal.”

Ah, elegant prose, an erudite man who kept a journal and so can write with the immediacy of a novel, a promise of adventure through railways of legend, and an eye and ear for incisively describing character. What’s not to love? Yet I soon felt an urge to skim. It was often depressing, this narrative filled with accounts of corruption, begging, prostitution, drug addiction and the just plain crass. (I really could have done without the long, involved graphic description of people defecating along the tracks.) Maybe it’s just that I’m reading Theroux at the tail end of a list of recommended travel books and I can’t help but compare him to other writers I encountered. Bill Bryson was often laugh-out-loud funny; John McPhee had a genius for eliciting from others stories that seemed to sum up a place; Rory Stewart exuded openness and genuine interest in the people he encountered. And though I had my issues with books by Pico Iyer and Elizabeth Gilbert, both in different ways showed compassion for the people they encountered and saw them as... well, human.

Theroux, on the other hand, struck me at times, if not racist or xenophobic, then maybe just plain misanthropic: “Afghans are lazy, idle, and violent.” "I always found myself in the company of Australians, who were like a reminder that I'd touched bottom." Russians he often called monkeys. His snobby horror at the very idea of riding in third class was unbelievable, and his behavior in Japan was so very rude I wished I could apologize on behalf of all Americans. (Really--don’t ask.) I rarely found in his account of drinking and whoring and peering at the landscape rushing past in trains any fresh insight or moving story. The one exception actually was his two chapters about visiting Vietnam in 1973 after the withdrawal of the Americans but before the South fell to the communists. Those chapters had a poignancy, vivid, memorable detail and Vietnam seemingly evoked a rare empathy in him missing in the other chapters. By itself those chapters redeemed the book enough to tempt me into giving it a third star. But in the end, at least for me, when it comes to a good travel book I prefer a less obnoxious companion, and I doubt I’ll read another book by this author. show less

Yes. Paul Theroux is a curmudgeon at best and a sexist, racist asshole at worst. Still, this book is compelling in its embrace of the nature of travel. That is, Theroux recognizes the wonderful coincidences of travel for the miracles they are while acknowledging the horror of the small burdens that travel creates. He puts on an air of condescension but in his conversations, he belies both a knowledge and interest in the cultures and people he comes into contact with. I see now why this is considered a classic.