Customer Reviews

The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia

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I recently re-read Theroux's Great Railway Bazaar and immediately was awash in memories of innumerable train journeys across the length and breadth of my native India. This is an excellent read both for train lovers (whom the exotic trains Theroux rides will captivate) as well as readers who enjoy travelogues. To be fair, this is less a travelogue than a series of vignettes covering Theroux's journeys through various Asian countries. Theroux makes no attempt to develop an understanding of the cultures he travels through but is content to describe the train itself along with a handful of anecdotes about the people he meets on each leg of his journey. Fair enough, this is not after all a sociological text but a travel diary of sorts.

And it is in description that Theroux's strength lies. He has the ability to make an anecdote seem so real as to make the reader a part of the scene. The pace of the book varies with the stop and start of each journey and I guess every reader will prefer some parts to others. Plus of course, it is a bit jarring when one reads this book today, since the tide of history has greatly changed many of the countries Theroux traversed. Still, culture is slower to change than politics and that keeps much of the book relevant even today.

One of the off-putting things about traditional travelogues is the litany of thing-descriptions (buildings, markets, clothes, hills) which just don't make for compelling brain food. Theroux focusses on people, and more specifically personalities. As an Indian, I can say that he captures the essence of different ilks of Indians with an incisiveness that I have not seen in any other American writer. I wish I had gotten my red, white and blue wife to read this before we visited. Many of her questions are answered episodically. Questions such as Why are some Indians so free with information about their digestive state? Why is an ailment worn like a badge of honor by some? Why do Indian travel guides always mention how far a book store is from your hotel? Isn't it admirable that somebody of such high stature is so unassuming? The incomprehensible extremes of know-it-alls versus humility amongst those with great erudition..He makes equally astute observations about Afghans, Burmese, Ceylonese etc., but I'll leave you to read the book to enjoy these.

Some may find this book insulting, as it is fairly blunt about the people's idiosyncrasies. I for one do not expect literature to be politically correct (and vice-versa).

"Train travel animate my imagination and usually give me solitude to order and write my thoughts: I travel easily in two directions, along the level rails while Asia flashed changes at the window, and at the interior rim of a private world of memory and language. I cannot imagine a luckier combination."

The words are from Paul Theroux's book The Great Railway Bazaar, where he takes us on a train journey through Asia. The book has excotic chapters, starting with The 15.30 - London to Paris, taking us via The Direct - Orient Express, The Night Mail to Meshed, The Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpus, The Trans - Siberian Express and so on. Names and places I dream of, and would like to go to - one day.
Paul Theroux has been there, and he has been there with an open mind and his pen and paper to take care of this world of memory and language.

This is fun reading. Some people call Theroux a rasist, but I don't agree. Theroux travels with an open mind and really see people and places where he goes. The way he shares his experiences with his readers is so rich and funny, you almost can feel the smell of the meal of old onions wrapped in a dirty piece of newspaper his travel companion is having, or you feel the dust in your eyes from the dry countryside you are passing.

I bought this book at an European airport when I was out travelling, and has read it as a "travel"-book, reading on planes, railways, busses, in cars and so on. And my eyes have been opened to see the people around me - not as grey everyday fellow travellers, but as all different human beings. And from Paul Theroux I have learned that strangers are not actually strangers, but people who can show me more of a mixed world when I take the time to start sharing part of my life with them.

Britt Arnhild Lindland.

This was my first Theroux novel and I'm already hooked. Theroux's descriptions of the fascinating people he encounters on the trip--from prostitutes to statesmen--are truly captivating. Even better are his vivid descriptions of the incredible scenery he takes in on his trip from London to the Far East. Be forewarned: once you read this book you will be tempted to quit your job, grab a backpack, and head for rails. If you enjoy the likes of Bill Bryson and Tim Cahill, you will certainly enjoy this novel.

This is a journal of a trip covering the major rail routes available in the 1970s across Europe and Asia. Theroux, an American, sets off from London on a tour where the journey itself was the goal. He wanted to sit back, observe, and absorb the atmosphere of the trains. In the book, he details his experiences on the trains, tells us about his fellow passengers, and describes what he was seeing out the windows while the trains wound across the tracks from Paris to Italy, Bulgaria to Turkey, Pakistan, India, Ceylon, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Japan, and the Soviet Union. Occasionally, he stopped for a night or two in a hotel along the way, and he also tells us of his adventures at these stops.

It's been years since I read a book by Paul Theroux. In the past, I found his attitude a bit off-putting. There's something about deciding to write a travel book, then taking a trip for the specific purpose of having something to write about that makes the whole genre somewhat useless. But now that I have traveled a bit more myself and have visited many of the countries that Theroux describes here, I can appreciate the accuracy of his descriptions much more. In traveling through a country in a few days by train, no one would be able to make enough observations to make worthwhile analyses of the culture or the society of a country, but that's not Theroux's goal in this book. Instead, it is the journey itself that he is describing- -the focus is on the trains, and the particular subculture of train travel. Theroux provides us with images of the trains themselves and the people one meets on them as he describes his experiences of months spent living on the trains.

Theroux's best descriptions are towards the beginning of the journey. By the end of the trip, he is reduced to a drunken stupor and his observations dwindle in the steppes of Siberia. The only reason for including his final chapters in the book are simply for the sake of completeness, to get him home again. The section on Vietnam is a remarkable snapshot of ordinary life trying to continue between the '73 ceasefire and the '75 withdrawal. It is images like these that give this book its enduring value.

"Paul Theroux is _so_ overrated!"

It was a line I would hear over and over again during the past month I spent with 'The Great Railway Bazaar' every time I fielded the inevitable "So...what are you reading now?" question so popular amongst writers and journalists.

Having finally finished the compact tome, I understand my colleagues' antipathy: Theroux makes it look so easy. Take a trip, write about it with lots of descriptive curliques and viola! money in the bank.

Theroux has a sharp eye and a neutral without being self-effacing voice that makes for the best travel writing. He is a master of detail, meticulously recreating the sense of place and space. As a writer, he is superb. And yet...I also sympathize with the criticisms that he exploits a place, visiting only for the writing, dismissing the deeper truth and more complicated understanding for the lurid, the sensational, the scene and the steam.

In 'Railway Bazaar' at least, Theroux at least makes no pretentions of being anything more than the passing observer. They are snapshots, vignettes viewed through a train window and filtered through half a bottle of gin. It is personal, and pretends to be nothing more. It also serves as a reaffirming paean to the joys of alcohol and travel.

As a book, it has its stops and gos. Slow at the start, it picks up spead through Central Asia, finds its confident footing in South and Southeast Asia, and then flounders through Japan and Russia. At its best, it captures a time and place, such as Vietnam at the end of the war or bits of India. Perhaps I found those parts more coherent because I traveled similar roads some 30 years later, and found it interesting to compare how things have changed - and how they haven't. I suspect other readers will find similar experiences: it is a book for the already seasoned traveller, not the armchair enthusiast.

The writer explores an unconventional region of the
world and develops his perceptions and feelings
towards his host countries by conveying
feelings about his immediate
environment - the insides of various trains
used to convey him across Asia.
Sharp insites into social, political,
and cultural aspects as gleened from
endlessly facinating descriptions of
fellow travelers encountered along the way.
I agree; he does lose some steam
at the end. But I think that's the reality of such
a long exhausting experience and,
ultimately, the author's point.<BR

Note: I made some immature Mormon angry because of my negative reviews of books that attempted to prove the Book of Mormon, and that person has been slamming my reviews almost as fast as they are posted.

So, your "helpful" votes are appreciated. Thanks, and note that a short review is not necessarily a bad review if it leads you to a great book.

If you always dreamed of traveling, then do it the easy way by reading one of Paul Theroux's accounts of his travels. They are funny and insightful and grand adventures. Check out these lines:

"The sad engineer would never go back to England; he would become one of these elderly expatriates who hide out in remote countries, with odd sympathies, a weakness for the local religion, an unreasonable anger, and the kind of total recall that drives curious strangers away."

Speaking of young foreign travelers, Theroux says:

"Occasionally, I saw an amorous pair leave their compartment hand in hand to go copulate in the toilet.
Most were on their way to India and Nepal, because
`the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu
And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.'
But the majority of them, going for the first time, had that look of frozen apprehension that is the mask of the face of an excapee."

Theroux has a great quote in the beginning of the first chapter--"The journey is the goal."

What an amazing book. It is the first book I have read by Paul Theroux and I am hooked. The descriptions he gives of every situation along the way are such that you feel you are living the moments with him. Having travelled a little, I can relate to a lot of the references he makes. References to smells and sights and sounds which form memories. He is the final straw that has convinced me to travel the Trans Siberian. A great book.

It hardly needs repeating that Paul Theroux is an exceptionally gifted writer. Moreover, this is a very skilfully written story, full of original and acute perceptions put across with wit and point. Theroux recounts a series of train journeys, interspersed with boat trips or aeroplane links where the rail option is not available, as for instance when making a sea crossing or in railless Afghanistan. In the course of this journey he has a number of lecturing engagements, presumably arranged in advance, for which I assume (although he does not say so) that he received a fee. I assume also that what took him away from his home and family for so many long months was not just the enjoyment of rail travel that he owns up to, but financial recompense for the book that he intended to publish as a record of his trip.

Earning an honest living by writing, and by travel writing in particular, is a worthy and honourable pursuit. However when the people represented in the story are real people, and the incidents are true occurrences, and the statements recorded are what people really said, there are to my way of thinking certain standards of taste and propriety that should be carefully adhered to. Personal records of travel and encounters along the way are presented impeccably in, say, Germaine Greer's `Daddy We Hardly Knew You' or in Peter Hessler's River Town and Oracle Bones. In these narratives the authors have reasons for being where they are and for meeting who they meet. These are accounts of research, investigation and exploration from which the books are a spin-off. They have not just taken a trip with a view to parading whoever they might happen to meet before the public at large, which is really what Theroux is doing here. Was the permission of Mr Duffill or Mr Molesworth sought before their statements and actions were made public? I doubt it somehow, but my idea of propriety doesn't even necessarily require that. The parties reported sympathetically by Dr Greer obviously knew what she was doing, but the personae she disliked would not have been consulted about what she intended to say about that them, and that is fine by me. What I am not happy about is going out on a fishing trip and subsequently dangling the fish on a line to be gawped at or derided. Some instances are worse than others. It is not particularly offensive to pillory the downmarket press of any country, such as the Indian weekly `Blitz' which informed him regarding some rowdy individual that `He was high and headstrong...Hurled abuse at some and then fisted a guest', in which the last verb is not used in a more recent sense but means `punched'. I also can't deny that I was amused (rather guiltily) at the clever representation of his Japanese host's offer to show him the local Tiergarten `You want to see tzu?' `What kind of tzu?' `Wid enemas'. Very smart, very clever, but coming from someone who spoke no Japanese more than a little patronising and de haut en bas.

I think it is perhaps the chapter on Japan that brings out in particular the slight sense of distaste I feel for this book. Theroux recounts at some length and with some particularity erotic shows and publications patronised by placid-seeming middle-class Japanese. I confess I find the shows as he describes them somewhat disgusting, but in a rather detached way. What revolts me more acutely is the spectacle of the audiences themselves, and that brings to the fore in my mind the nature of Theroux's own narration. What exactly is he doing there in the first place? He is another audience on the next tier. Does he have some mission to tell the world about all this? Is he engaged in academic research? None of that, and he does at least show awareness of the issue, admitting that he is a bit of a drone amusing himself idly and in the process making rather free with other people's privacy for the entertainment of a paying public.

All that said, the book still has plenty to recommend it. I felt that the later chapters are better than the earlier, which have too much sense about them of `oh look at these people doing these things' and `this guy said this three-quarter's of a page worth to me'. There was a sharp improvement starting with the chapter on Singapore, where Theroux's trenchant comments seem to me to be not only valid in themselves but also to satisfy one of my own requirements from a book of this kind by offering analysis and generalisation rather than just random detail. Also, the book was written in the early 1970's, and so is a reminder of an epoch. This was pre-junta Burmah, for instance. It was the time of the cold war. South Africa was still under apartheid although the availability of the industrial capacity of the Japanese obtained for them the status of `white' from Mr Botha or whoever was in charge in South Africa at the time in question. Above all, it was the time of the war in Vietnam, and the vignettes of that ravaged nation as recounted by so talented and independent a storyteller made a vivid impression on one reader at least.

At one point Theroux comments that travel narratives turn into autobiography. The books I have instanced by Greer and Hessler are certainly autobiography and rightly so. I only wish this book had practised what it preaches. Theroux gives away comparatively little about himself apart from his participation in a few dialogues, the purpose of which is largely to pillory his interlocutors, and I particularly miss precisely this sense of personal development which he himself says one should expect.

There is next to nothing for railway geeks, but if I remember one thing above all from the book, it is the tantalising semi-description of the viaduct at Gokteik in Burmah.