Two books from Paul Theroux in three months — what a bonanza! And in this new account of re-traveling the route (with a few minor changes) of his The Great Railway Bazaar, published in 1975, we see him writing the stories in The Elephanta Suite I reviewed in July [Taipei Times, July 20, 2008, Page 14]. In one story, he says, he’s venting his feelings about India, as well he might — India is one of the Asian countries he finds most fault with, along with Burma and Singapore. But then no book from this stable would come up to expectations if it didn’t have its share of sarcasm and doubly barbed invective.
Theroux is now 67 and aware of it — references to his age are frequent. He’s had double cataract surgery, he says, and buys sleeping pills en route. And he muses on how the world has changed, largely for the worse, in 33 years — “shrinking to a ball of bungled desolation,” he concludes.
His last sentence is nevertheless “The going is still good.” The book is crowded with references to his travel-writing predecessors and this phrase probably remembers Evelyn Waugh’s 1946 selection from his travel writing, When the Going Was Good. He ambles round Japan’s Nara Prefecture with Pico Ayer, and the pair evaluate all the great travelers they can think of, implying an imaginary company of which they are both part (and Theroux certainly is). He frequently mentions his old mentor V.S. Naipaul, as well as his interview with Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires, and in this book he interviews Orhan Pamuk in Turkey, Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka and Haruki Murakami in Tokyo. (“Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional,” quotes Murakami, a man who once ran a 100km marathon).
Once again, as with so many of Theroux’s products, this is an endlessly resourceful and stimulating book. He sets off from London on a gloomy March day and travels through France, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Georgia, Turkmenistan (“a landscape like cat litter”), Uzbekistan, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Japan, and then back through Russia on the trans-Siberian railway.
He encounters missionaries with disgust, and quotes Mark Twain on The Book of Mormon — “chloroform in print.” Indeed, Paul Theroux is America’s modern Mark Twain — at least as good a writer, and possibly even better.
The chapter likely to attract most debate is the one on Singapore. This is a place Theroux has a long-standing grudge against, and here he appears to be having what may be his last say on the matter. No holds are barred. “What I have written so far would be enough to get my ass whipped in Singapore. Strange blooms, eh? Cruel and unforgiving government, eh? Drop your pants and bend over, Mister Thorax! You’re getting fifty cuts of the rotan!”
The Asian countries he likes best are Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam. He considers Sri Lanka’s problematic economy has held back change so that the island still retains much of its old charm, that Thailand is remarkably clean and efficient, and that Vietnam has an astonishing lack of resentment about the war, displaying instead a determination to get on with life (in contrast to the self-pitying pleas for handouts he sees as characterizing Cambodia).
He nowhere spares his own country. The US carpet-bombing of Cambodia in the 1970s “without any authorization from Congress,” killing 600,000 people and “driving the peasants into joining the Khmer Rouge” is only matched in infamy in Theroux’s eyes by the bombing of North Vietnam in December of 1972. This was part of the US’s “evil-intentioned outrages directed from the air,” he writes, and an “unambiguously genocidal act of pure wickedness.”
He finds things to blame former US presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton for too, but he also defends the US, noting (not for the first time — he said the same in Sudan in Dark Star Safari) that people who criticize the place would often give everything they have to live there.
As for Burma, Theroux’s pages on the country are the most moving in the book. He pities the people with every inch of his soul, and befriends a Mandalay bicycle-rickshaw driver who’d spent his life educating the young, but still remained a pauper.
Other countries scarcely fare less badly. He considers Pakistan was (in 2006) too dangerous for an American to visit, and sees Russia as remaining what it had always been, even under the czars, “a pretentious empire with a cruel government that was helpless without secret police.” He visits the remains of the most notorious Soviet gulag prison, Perm 36, and says he wouldn’t survive two days in one of its punishment cells.
He talks to ordinary people, stays in US$10 hotels (though occasionally treating himself to luxury, as at the Eastern and Oriental in Penang), and makes a point of finding out how much everyone earns. He finds that some graduates in call-centers in Bangalore earn as little as US$60 a week, concluding that India, far from experiencing an economic rebirth, remains what it was to the British in the 18th century, a place where money can be made by others on the backs of the cheap labor of the locals.
Theroux is everywhere cheeky, knowledgeable, funny, observant (needless to say) and, presumably, scrupulously honest. It appears he’s no longer the fish-eating vegetarian he described himself as being 16 years ago in The Happy Isles of Oceania, asking then why animals should die so he could paddle his canoe around the Pacific. Nowadays he buys salami and sausages.
But he remains the best of all travelers because he reaches out to ordinary people while remaining deeply skeptical of governments. “Politicians are always inferior to their citizens,” he concludes. There are almost 500 pages in this wonderful book, and not one of them contains a single dull sentence.
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