Paul Theroux, now 61, states that when he set out to travel from Cairo to Cape Town what he wanted most was to get away -- from cellphones, Fedex, Internet cafes, and Web sites. The only Web site he wanted to visit was that of the poisonous Central African bird-eating spider.
Theroux tackles his project the hard way. Admittedly he has to fly in and out of Sudan because the land borders are closed. But for the rest he rides on trucks and crowded minibuses, hitches lifts with nuns, takes the train. "Most trains in Africa look as if they are on their way to Auschwitz," he comments, though later he travels on South Africa's Blue Train, one of the most luxurious on earth.
He'd been there before -- as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, as a teacher in Uganda (both in the 1960s), and researching the Zambezi river in 1999 -- and longs for the open skies and the simple life. He likes being in Africa because it's nothing like home. Instead, it's "like being on a dark star."
It is unfortunate that the strong tone of the introduction doesn't carry through into the book's opening chapters. In Egypt he accompanies mindless tourists, and his jokes at their expense are vapid and repetitive. Where's the old Theroux fire, you ask yourself, the dismissive rebuke, the sardonic encapsulation, the trademark outspokenness? Instead, tourists are endlessly quoted as saying "fronic" for "pharaonic" and commenting "How in heck did they manage to lift these things?"
In addition, he hedges. "Bush is Satan! Clinton is Satan!" someone says to him in Sudan. "I dunno," Theroux keeps replying, before noting that the man goes on to ask him how he can work in the US.
Nevertheless, the very form of the journey, traveling through one country after another, ensures a monumental structure to the book, like a series of granite blocks pushed up one against the other. But it's not until Theroux gets angry that the narrative really catches fire.
Before then, he manages to keep his cool, despite considerable provocation. He's howled at as a foreigner in Ethiopia, shot at on the roof of a truck in northern Kenya, watches a thief pursued by a murderous crowd in Nairobi.
Then in Malawi he visits the school where he taught 40 years ago and is appalled. Where there had been a library with 10,000 books, now there are empty shelves, and not even any adequate lights. The gardens are not tended, the teachers' bungalows no longer cared for. He had wanted to stay and teach a little, but instead reacts with fury. What is all this begging for aid when it is embezzled by politicians and nobody cares? Why were the Indian shopkeepers driven out when now there are no shops at all? All this aid only delays real change, he concludes, which has to come from Africans if it is to come at all.
This fighting talk does wonders for the book. Once Theroux is roused, it springs to life. As a result the second half is far better. Ill, he stumbles along a street, but still has the strength to demand that a beggar ask him for work, not money.
It's impossible not to contrast Africa with Asia. Here, energy and self-improvement are on every side. There, in the worst places Theroux describes, lassitude and dependence appear to have become a way of life.
Not surprisingly, Theroux brings in the appropriate books wherever possible. He cites Flaubert on Egypt and studies Rimbaud in preparation for Ethiopia. He feels like Huck Finn in a giant dugout on the Zambezi, and on a farm in Zimbabwe remembers that all the classic stories he's liked best have been rural ones. He finds one of his own novels still banned, and meets a backpacker reading his My Secret Life.
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