Fifty years ago, The Great Railway Bazaar appeared and dazzlingly lifted travel writing out of its midcentury doldrums.
Its opening was perfect—“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.”—but a little misleading. It offered a personal insight in a book with very few of them, and hit a wistful note that was quickly abandoned. The author, a 34-year-old American expat named Paul Theroux, was no romantic. His love of trains was unassailable; he had spent four and a half months traveling through half of the northern hemisphere on them. But he was an acute observer and an uncompromising writer: frank, blunt, opinionated, occasionally arch, frequently funny, always entertaining—the ideal companion for the armchair traveler, a type that outnumbered actual ones in 1975, when fewer than five percent of Americans owned a passport.
Theroux was a novelist, not a travel writer, when he set out on his rail journey in 1973. As he wrote in Granta in 1989, “I had always somewhat disliked travel books: they seemed self-indulgent, unfunny and rather selective. I had an idea that the travel writer left a great deal out of his books and put the wrong things in.”
He became a travel writer, and an ardent reformer, the moment he boarded that first train in London. And he did so by using the tools of the novelist. The Great Railway Bazaar is packed with characters—fellow passengers Duffill and Molesworth appear early on like an old vaudeville team—and larded with dialogue that, like dialogue in the best novels, has the ring of the authentic—presumably, ideally, because it is. On the Direct-Orient Express, the entire car is brought marvelously to life: the young Belgian woman, the frail American couple, the French mother who “breathed suspicion” on her daughter. Theroux captures the loose, uneven camaraderie of travelers thrown together for a time, and makes the reader long to be a part of it. Oh, you think, to be traveling through Europe with this colorful cast.
Theroux tells little about himself; this was a good decade before Mary Morris’s Nothing to Declare opened the door for introspective travel books. He drops hints that he’s a novelist, and mentions kissing a wife goodbye; we learn he has a cold and only later that he has children. He is guarded with his readers, just as he is with his fellow passengers; it’s their stories he wants to hear, and share with us. Why would you travel through Europe and Asia and talk about yourself?
He does create a flattering persona, that of an experienced, knowledgeable, unruffled man at home in the world, even if frequently at odds with it; more of an off-duty James Bond than an American thirtysomething. Planning his route through Afghanistan (a country without trains), he inquires about the situation among the Baluchi tribesmen. He never mentions his years in Africa, and tells of living in Singapore only as he approaches the city, so his savoir-faire is as surprising as it is impressive: bribing conductors, speaking Italian, traveling with gin, smoking a pipe. In several cities along the route, he gives lectures—“vaporings” as he dubs them—on the American novel.
He is exceptionally well-read, and not shy about showing it. In Granta, on his list of things travel writers left out of their accounts, were “the names of books read to kill time,” and, as if making up for decades of omission, Theroux tells us what he’s reading as he goes along: Little Dorrit on the Van Gölü Express, the Chekhov story “Ariadne” on the Khyber Mail, E. M. Forster’s The Longest Journey on the Delhi Mail. In Delhi he picks up “Joyce’s Exiles, Browning’s poems, The Narrow Corner by Somerset Maugham.” He reads Gogol’s Dead Souls on the International Express to Butterworth, Edogawa Rampo’s Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination on the Hatsukari Limited Express, and Shūsaku Endō’s Silence on the Hikari Super Express—while the Japanese man next to him reads Henry James’s The Golden Bowl. On the Trans-Siberian Express he finishes George Gissing’s New Grub Street and starts—interestingly—Borges’s Labyrinths.
Other writers make appearances. Already on page four, Theroux quotes Anthony Trollope’s Lady Glencora and, a few pages later, conversing with Molesworth, recites a line from The Waste Land. Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Burroughs, and V. S. Naipaul are all enlisted for their musings—Dickens in India, as Theroux finds that a description of London from Martin Chuzzlewit perfectly captures contemporary Calcutta. At Vevey, he thinks of Daisy, and in Japan, rattled by months of displacement and movement, he feels like Gilbert Pinfold.
In Istanbul, Theroux spends a day with the writer Yashar Kemal, and this outing takes up more space than his visits to the Topkapi Palace and Hagia Sophia. For him, sightseeing is “an activity that delights the truly idle because it seems so much like scholarship”; he’s much happier, and more productive, talking to people—a practice he would later in his career describe as “buttonholing”—and attentively walking the streets, where the “hairy brown sweaters and argyle socks” suggest to him that the city has stood still since the death of Atatürk in 1938.
Sort of like travel writing. Most travel writers who visited Istanbul before Theroux wrote, as if by some unwritten professional decree, about the history and the architecture, the restaurants and hotels (with the obligatory nod to the Pera Palace and Agatha Christie); no one mentioned the hairy brown sweaters. Presumably they saw them, provided their heads weren’t buried in guidebooks, but they viewed them as insignificant compared to the treasures of the Topkapi jewel room. The problem was, the jewels had already been written about; the past was a well-covered, pawed-over subject. Few people wrote about the Turkey of their time. And it was Theroux’s great talent to be able not only to home in on a sartorial detail that vividly brought the Turks to life—and put his readers there on the streets with them—but to glean from it a valuable insight.
One of the potential hazards of a book like The Great Railway Bazaar is superficiality. Travel writers, by definition, travel, but most spend more time in a place than a train passenger breezing through. Of course, Theroux gets off his trains throughout the book, but he never stays for long, always conscious of the next departure. So inevitably, his observations are fleeting. Cognizant of this, he makes sure they’re arresting—sometimes by being spot-on, as in Istanbul, sometimes simply by being provocative.
Oil-rich Teheran reminds him of Dallas—he meets American oil men in bars that resemble saloons—and, though he doesn’t predict the revolution, he is astute, and characteristically irreverent, about the political situation that in a few years will give birth to it: “An ugly monomaniac with a diamond tiara, who calls himself “The King of Kings,” is their answer to government, a firing squad their answer to law.” (Tragically, the Iranian answer to law has remained more or less unchanged.)
The book is a mine of memorable aphorisms. “Afghanistan is a nuisance,” Theroux declares, as if some American foreign policy expert of the future. “Nothing happens in Burma,” he opines on the Mandalay Express, “but then nothing is expected to happen.” The “Local to Maymyo” chapter begins: “Asia washes with spirited soapy violence in the morning.” While merrily announcing a discovery, this sentence shows one of the rewards of travel in countries where life is lived outdoors.
Like many visitors to Bangkok, he is struck by the city’s carnal side, but he has something to measure it against. “As Calcutta smells of death and Bombay of money, Bangkok smells of sex, but this sexual aroma is mingled with the sharper whiffs of death and money.”
In Vietnam, he corrects the popular image of Americans as imperialists there, noting that, unlike the French, we built nothing of lasting value in the country. “The American mission was purely sententious and military; nowhere was there evidence of the usual municipal preoccupations of a colonizing power—road-mending, drainage, or permanent buildings.” In an ironic gesture that would become prophetic, Theroux talks to tourism officials—the war was still going on—who are bullish on Vietnam becoming a popular destination. Though, riding on the Huế-Danang Passenger Train, he writes: “Of all the places the railway had taken me since London, this was the loveliest.”
In Tokyo, he delineates the various stages of Japanese drunkenness: “Between the loudness and paralysis they throw up and sing.” And in another, perhaps less accidental, instance of prescience, he attends a show at the Nichigeki Music Hall—which surprises him with sex on stage as well as on film—and later wonders if the Japanese “had arrived at some point of sexual exhaustion that had its refinement in watching an act they had no interest in performing themselves.” (Reading that today, you invariably think of the country’s problematically low birth rate.) Watching crowds of surgically masked people waiting patiently for the light to change, Theroux worries that “a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.” This despite the fact that he’s been reading Endō. But by now, he’s starting to go a little off.
His fragile mental state leads to different kinds of insights. Holed up in his Osaka hotel, he muses: “All journeys were return journeys. The farther one traveled, the nakeder one got, until, towards the end, ceasing to be animated by any scene, one was most oneself, a man in a bed surrounded by empty bottles.”
The Great Railway Bazaar is also a book that frequently makes you stop and underline a sentence simply because of how brilliantly it captures a look, a scene, a moment with an offbeat association, a precious detail, a perfect word, an unexpected finish. The Pakistanis have “the thin scornful mustaches of magicians and movie villains.” On the Rajdhani Express, people “queued in puddles at the toilet doors.” The women on a Vietnamese train clutch “their cruelly sunburned half-American infants.” A compartment-mate on the Trans-Siberian Express “coughed and choked … belching with disgusting thoroughness as he exhausted himself of wind in three keys.”
Now you’re not really wishing to be in that Russian compartment, but you’re grateful that this observant wordsmith is.
When The Great Railway Bazaar appeared in 1975, it was a critical and commercial success. Most readers saw it as a revelation, something fresh and new, though it was really a throwback, and not because it was an endorsement of slow travel in the age of the jumbo jet. Theroux was writing very much in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh, whose pre-war travel books had also given the people precedence over the sights, and employed a similarly haughty and humorous tone. But most Americans had not read Labels or Remote People. Robert Towers, reviewing The Great Railway Bazaar in The New York Times Book Review on August 24, 1975, noted the English influences, tracing the book’s lineage all the way back to Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey before announcing that it was “the most consistently entertaining and the least boring book I have encountered in a long time.”
Not everyone was enamored. The ’70s were too early for Theroux to be attacked as privileged, or his literary tastes condemned as non-inclusive, but many people found him flippant and insensitive, a bit too fond of the jokey insult. At Belgrade Station, he introduces a group of peasants as “Mama Jug, Papa Jug, Granny Jug, and a lot of little Jugs”—a line that would not get past any editor, not to mention sensitivity reader, today—and he has facile fun with Japanese mispronunciations of English (as Waugh did with Somali butcherings of the language). For some mysterious reason, he harbors a constitutional dislike of Australians.
A more mature Theroux has acknowledged the book’s occasional callowness; when he retraced the journey three decades later, a trip described in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, he called the author of the earlier book “a punk.” That young man set off in low spirits, we learn in the opening pages of the new book, depressed about leaving his family for a long time; he felt propelled because as a novelist he’d run out of ideas (a rare moment in a career that now includes 31 novels). And he suffered from homesickness throughout the journey. None of this information makes its way into The Great Railway Bazaar, thankfully, for a sorry, confessional tone would have marred the atmosphere of jaunty adventure. Though it would have made the author more relatable, and likable.
Instead, he was branded a curmudgeon—a label that stuck and that Theroux has denied throughout his career. What people see as harshness, he insists, is simply refreshing honesty.
Like most works viewed as groundbreaking, The Great Railway Bazaar appeared as a shock. The great Holiday magazine—which had published William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Paul Bowles, Truman Capote—was still around in 1975, but in a very diminished state. The travel writing most Americans read, in magazines and Sunday newspaper sections, was pedestrian and promotional; it consisted of bland articles that focused on the past—the monuments and museums—and ignored the present. Like propaganda, they were cleansed of anything negative, critical, controversial, or upsetting. The purpose of travel articles, as with the travel ads that surrounded them, was to get a growing and skittish American middle-class traveling.
Then along came this canny, gimlet-eyed, Anglo-American upstart showing the world as it is, in all its complex, unsanitized richness. As he later suggested in Granta, not even many travel books did that.
There were exceptions. A strong British squad was still in the field—Freya Stark, Lawrence Durrell, Eric Newby, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Norman Lewis, V. S. Pritchett, Jan Morris—though their books were not that well-known in the States. And V.S. Naipaul was continuing the British tradition of the novelist-cum-travel writer, publishing The Middle Passage (1962), about his return to the Caribbean, and, two years later, An Area of Darkness, a fiercely critical examination of India.
American-made travel books of comparable quality were harder to come by, though they popped up now and then. Henry Miller traveled cross-country, after the war drove him home from France, and poured all his outrage into The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945). S. J. Perelman took his high-low humor on the road in Westward Ha! (1948), which he followed two years later with The Swiss Family Perelman (a collection of his Holiday pieces). Mary McCarthy produced the learned but more traditional Venice Observed (1956) and The Stones of Florence (1959). A. J. Liebling came out with Normandy Revisited (1958), a loving homage to the region of France where he had worked as a war correspondent, followed quickly by Between Meals, a memoir of heroic Gallic eating that blurred the line between travel and food writing (which perhaps explains why it’s one of the few books from this time that is read today). M. F. K. Fisher’s Map of Another Town (1964) was a graceful evocation of her time in Aix-en-Provence. John McPhee and Edward Hoagland turned their eyes to nature in The Pine Barrens (1968) and Notes from the Century Before: A Journal from British Columbia (1969). And Kate Simon wrote her “uncommon guidebooks” that mixed practical information with insightful essays.
Two American travel books of the postwar era captured the public’s imagination and entered the ranks of modern classics: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley (1962). In many ways—style, content, purpose, spirit—they could not be more different: Kerouac the experimental prose-poet, Steinbeck the conventional raconteur (who nevertheless spent an inordinate amount of time in his head). Though the books share a few similarities. Both have as their basis American road trips (like The Air-Conditioned Nightmare). And while On the Road is sometimes labeled a novel, Travels with Charley, it was discovered by a journalist traveling in the author’s footsteps, is partly fictional.
But despite their popularity—On the Road landed on syllabuses, and Travels with Charley took its place on shelves in countless dens—neither book sparked a wave of new travel writing. In defense of the former, it’s hard to reinvigorate a genre when you defy genres.
The Great Railway Bazaar, on the other hand, created a travel writing craze.
It was helped by the publication, in 1977, of Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, a book that was hailed as a masterpiece, even by people who worked in more “respectable” genres. Stylistically, it was almost as different from The Great Railway Bazaar as On the Road was from Travels with Charley: a pared down, elliptical prose versus an uninhibited, freewheeling one. But in spite of their differences, Theroux and Chatwin became travel writing’s handsome poster boys—and friends—as publishers enthusiastically embraced the genre. Random House, Prentice Hall, and Atlantic Monthly Press established imprints devoted solely to travel books, publishing works as diverse as Making Hay by Verlyn Klinkenborg and From Heaven Lake by Vikram Seth, among other titles, and reprinting three of Fisher’s books about France. Patrick Leigh Fermor’s radiant account of his walk across Europe in the 1930s finally appeared as A Time of Gifts (the first of what would become three volumes). Theroux added more train books, The Old Patagonian Express and Riding the Iron Rooster, while also exploring Great Britain in The Kingdom by the Sea. By the late ’80s, travel writing was so big that Banana Republic built little book coves inside their clothing stores and filled them with guidebooks and travel narratives and—for one brief period in 1988—the company’s own travel magazine, Trips. In a country that had historically looked inward, readers were suddenly taking an interest in the world. And in a profession where the clichéd goal was The Great American Novel, many writers now dreamed of a travel bestseller.
The exhilarating change was not limited to books. New magazines appeared – National Geographic Traveler and Condé Nast Traveler—and the German monthly GEO launched an American edition. Rolling Stone, of all publications, ran Jan Morris’s idiosyncratic essays on place (enough to fill three book collections). In England, the American Bill Buford turned Granta into travel writing’s unofficial house organ, rediscovering writers from the older generation—Norman Lewis, Martha Gellhorn—while introducing the new guard: Jonathan Raban, Colin Thubron, Redmond O’Hanlon, Ryszard Kapuściński, Isabel Hilton, Bill Bryson.
Books by these and other writers bolstered the idea—not that prevalent in the States—of “travel literature”: Chatwin’s The Songlines, Thubron’s Behind the Wall, Kapuściński’s Shah of Shahs, Bryson’s The Lost Continent, Raban’s Old Glory, Ian Frazier’s Great Plains, Joan Didion’s Salvador, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, Amy Wilentz’s The Rainy Season, Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s Italian Days. England had seen a blossoming of travel writing between the wars—when intuitive novelists (George Orwell, Graham Greene) joined erudite ramblers (Robert Byron, Norman Douglas)—and now, in the second half of the century, both sides of the Atlantic were experiencing a renaissance. Though the new travel writing, in many cases, was more analytical, making use of interpretive as well as descriptive skills. And Raban, focusing as he did on the United States, stumbled upon the useful strategy, in an era of mass tourism, of going where the tourists lived—in Old Glory, the cities and towns along the Mississippi River.
This stellar moment for travel writing was due in large part to The Great Railway Bazaar. It’s hard to think of another modern book that did so much for its genre. Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time is sometimes credited with having been a harbinger of the contemporary memoir, but its influence was more among writers than readers. Perhaps the closest equivalent is Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the phenomenal effect it had on the growth and popularity of the graphic novel.
Sadly, the heyday lasted only about a decade and a half. By the ’90s, publishers were already starting to favor the memoir. Feeding into this change of taste, and perhaps accelerating it, were Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence (1989) and Frances Mayes’s Under the Tuscan Sun (1996), both of which constituted a new type of travel book, one people read not so much to learn about foreign lands—as previous generations did with Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa and Gerald Brenan’s South from Granada—but rather to fantasize about having the idyllic experiences of the authors.
After 9/11, the already reduced interest in travel books grew even smaller, presumably because we now saw the world as a nasty and dangerous place. If anything, that horrific attack should have made us more, not less, curious about life beyond our borders. But it was clear that the country that had learned to look outward was unhealthily returning its gaze inward—a change that was deleterious not only for us. Foreigners are forever vexed, and alarmed, to learn that a country with so much influence in the world has so little knowledge of the world. The tremendous success of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love (2006), and to a lesser extent Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), might have helped the cause if not for the fact that they were more memoirs than travel books.
Americans started traveling again, but they didn’t find inspiration in travel books. As the sins of colonialism became more exposed, travel writing was denounced as one of its modern-day extensions—curiously, as works by writers like Kapuściński helped in the exposing. Similarly, it has been deemed an act of cultural appropriation; let the Indians tell us about India, the Slovaks about Slovakia. The outside observer, who throughout history has played an essential role—from Pausanias to Bourdain—is now considered by many to be expendable, if not contemptible.
Technology has also played a role. Seeing the world on a screen in the palm of your hand can make reading words on a page seem laughably retro and impractical. Like taking a train when you can fly. And the Internet is crowded with bloggers, influencers, and content providers, i.e., tips and information, which most of today’s travelers prefer to aperçus.
Many travel writers have found other ways to make a living, some of them as food writers. The weekly list of new book deals from Publishers Marketplace includes the categories of Food/Beverage, Lifestyle, and Parenting but not Travel. The travel magazines that haven’t gone out of business—like National Geographic Traveler—have shrunk considerably. The Travel section of the Sunday New York Times is the only section of that paper that doesn’t appear in print. The last edition of The Best American Travel Writing appeared in 2021; the series editor, Jason Wilson, now covers the world of wine and spirits. The anthology resurfaced last year, with a new editor, and a new title: The Best American Food and Travel Writing.
Still, travel writing lives on. “It can no more die,” Pico Iyer wrote in Granta in 2017, “than curiosity or humanity or the strangeness of the world can die.” Though Iyer’s most recent book is about his silent retreats to a Benedictine hermitage. The few travel books that are now published to acclaim tend to be specialized and esoteric, often illuminating larger worlds through small, deeply plumbed ones: Kapka Kassabova’s Anima, an elegy for pastoral life in her native Bulgaria, and Sophy Roberts’s The Lost Pianos of Siberia.
Even Theroux—who once half-boasted that no one ever accused him of traveling with a theme—has been taking trips with more of a focus, and they have resulted in exhaustive, eye-opening books: Deep South (2015), about America’s rural poor, and On the Plain of Snakes (2019), about Mexico. The latter book has some of the richness, and certainly heft, of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West’s classic about the Balkans. But despite its importance and, owing to immigration, timeliness, The New York Times Book Review failed to give it a full review, dumping it instead into its year-end roundup of travel books. It was an odd way to treat the man who helped make such roundups possible.
Unfazed, the octogenarian Theroux keeps traveling; his next book, he’s mentioned in interviews, will be about Canada. An inveterate listener, he told one podcaster that he’s become even more of one in his old age. His voice hasn’t changed: softly clipped, spirited, debunking, amused—it’s the voice of a man still riveted by the world.