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.
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